Fiction and Failure
Adrian Poole, 15 April 1982
Blind Understanding
by Stanley Middleton.
Hutchinson, 159 pp., £7.50, March 1982,0 09 146990 2 Show More
by Stanley Middleton.
Hutchinson, 159 pp., £7.50, March 1982,
Levitation: Five Fictions
by Cynthia Ozick.
Secker, 157 pp., £6.95, March 1982,0 436 25482 4 Show More
by Cynthia Ozick.
Secker, 157 pp., £6.95, March 1982,
“... There is a point in Stanley Middleton’s Blind Understanding at which a man does not eat a dry biscuit. Listening to the sound of the nine o’clock television news from the distance of his kitchen, a 70-year-old retired solicitor remarks his immunity to the sad record of violent death, industrial disorder and foreign famine in worlds elsewhere. ‘Such did not touch him nearly; he could be disgruntled without adventitious help ... ”