Pice IYEA
553
The harsh transparency of her unblinking, unstinting realism is
almost photographic.
And ultimately these stories may best be regarded as a collec–
tion of photos in an album: each records a situation, revives a
memory, and redeems nothing. Considering them is like consult–
ing a doctor's x-ray of contemporary America. But unless he is
impeccably sterilized, a doctor is vulnerable to the very diseases he
treats; just so, the closeness of Beattie's manner to her matter can
be dangerous. Privy to anomie, her stories become party to it;
faithful to the details of the world, they seem treacherous to the
energy and heroic idealism that are her country's saving grace.
Her disciplined, level-headed realism-exemplary of the meticu–
lous tradition she upholds-finally passes on to the reader, as if
by contagion, a melancholy torpor that suffocates. And so, hav–
ing paid one's respects to the tasteful and well-ordered room of
her fiction, one yearns only to escape, or to fling its windows
open and admit the wild, fresh air of possibility.
(fYou
Don't
Weaken
The Autobiography of Oscar Ameringer
By
Oscar Ameringer
Introduction by James R. Green
Oscar Ameringer immigrated to the United
States in the I880s and became an impor·
tant leader in the Socialist movement of
the early 20th century, Charles A. Beard
called this book, " the epic of an American
radical wandering with laughter and tears
through a long stretch of troubled history,"
525 pp, Cloth, $27.50; paper, $14.95
Please write {or OLlr {ree catalog
University of
Oklahoma Press
Dept. 702 1005 Asp Avtnut Norman,OK 7.lO19
