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Full-Text Articles in American Literature
Representative Men, Shaun O'Connell
Representative Men, Shaun O'Connell
New England Journal of Public Policy
"Representativeness" is the theme of Shaun O'Connell's essay, "Representative Men." Reviewing six books, one about an actual man and five about fictional men, O'Connell sees them as attempts to define "representative men" of the 1980s, "an era," he observes, "when the worst were full of passionate intensities, particularly among men." Each antiheroic man in these books, he concludes, was "selfish, domineering, dangerous to women, and deceitful, yet each man was also committed to a system of values and ideas that made him an interesting case history — values which, in some instances, redeemed his failings."
As usual, O'Connell, in his …
Vantage Points: Prose Parables Of The Republic, Shaun O'Connell
Vantage Points: Prose Parables Of The Republic, Shaun O'Connell
New England Journal of Public Policy
Shaun O'Connell brings his usual insights to his book review essay. "Our novelists," he concludes, "have served us better than our politicians in classifying our condition" — an accomplishment that is somewhat less grand than it seems when we remember that the recent competition came from George Bush's "Read my lips" and "A thousand points of light" and Michael Dukakis's "Good jobs at good wages" and "I'm on your side."
Among the works discussed in this essay: Firebird, by James Carroll; Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories, by Raymond Carver; Paris Trout, by Pete Dexter; …