In the following negative review, Cooper identifies cliched characters and bad writing as two reasons why Body and Soul is a "disappointment."

Younger writers who've pulled off that rare feat, a wonderful first book, work on under a hefty burden of expectations. Frank Conroy was thirty in 1967 when he published Stop-Time, his memoirs of a childhood marked by the absence of a disturbed and alcoholic father. A collection of sharp images retrieved "from the very edge of memory," Stop-Time anatomized experience rather than judged it, setting forth episodes of boyhood - the thrill of scavenging an abandoned building with a best friend, the brutal beating of a helpless fat boy at boarding school - from a detached, almost amoral perspective that held out to readers the persistent illusion of breaking through adult sentimentality to see life as it "really" was.

Praised lavishly for its intelligent candor by...