HJ "The Art of Fiction"

[Campbel Morgan]

Again, the author, while he can't quite keep his political ideas off the
table all the time, has set out to write a perfect work of art and to
demonstrate his skills. His quip on HJ at the start of the adventure that
quickly goes North, or is it South?, over the rainbow anyway, is telling; he
is not HJ and has no reason to be, but is, while as far from the realist
fiction of HJ's day, an artist composing fiction as HJ outlined and defined
it: he practices the ART of fiction. He plays with Twain, TSI, he plays with
Hemingway, Eliot, Fitzgerald, then, as HJ does, the encounter of the
Americans and the old world and the sins of the world, then two California
briefs that play around political party talk and happenings in cultural
bursts, then a masterwork and another, now to the California again for an
easy rider. The voice, the style, so brilliant at times, as in AGTD, now
languishes and bleeds a screed from the end of the bar.
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