As a work of art [A Fan's Notes] is rambling, unclear, repetitious, and written in that curious overblown American style exemplified by the now famous remark of the US Ambassador to the Queen about redecorating his house and 'encountering elements of discomfiture in the refurbishing'. The effect here is rather like getting button-holed by a drunk in a bar who grips you by both lapels, breathing whisky and polysyllables into your face, and never uses two words where he can possibly find 10 that'll do. Indeed, one American critic found this pompous, drunken prose pleasing, but then there is no available means of data-computing the elements of individual selectivity processes or, for that matter, no accounting for tastes. The book does tell us something about one neurotic American's corruption and near-destruction in pursuit of fame and success…. The dream is so strongly believed in that it is followed into real madness. Jobs, family, friends, everything is sacrificed to the dream of fame, with increasingly destructive drunkenness the only way of sustaining the false faith in one's talent. (p. 158)
Stanley Reynolds, in New Statesman (© 1970 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), January 30, 1970.
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