He is married and has one child.
Though he has achieved his still somewhat cultish reputation as a novelist and, to a lesser degree in recent years, as an Esquire columnist and Playboy contributor, Crews's finest book is his autobiography. In fact, of his last half-dozen volumes, four of them (three novels) are first class, and one imagines that within a short time he will be more widely recognized as a substantial talent. Already, what had been for some years the common reductive comparative practice among bemused reviewers of his work is receding; today one is less likely to read, after exclamatory plot summary, that Crews is like or is up to, or is not like or is not up to, such diverse notables as Flannery O'Connor, Terry Southern, George Garrett, or--to nail down the point--William Faulkner. Crews, at his best, writes only like Crews: he is a genuine original.
In terms of fictional techniques, Crews is a traditional storyteller; it was from his analytical study of Graham Greene's fiction that he began to learn how to fashion a story, what would work. Yet the essence of Crews's art and vision is experiential and aesthetic risk taking: excess is his mean.
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