Not even from Francine Prose, who opines, “The problem was that every word I was reading was not only reminding me of, but making me desperately wish that I was reading, another book that, as it happens, begins with a man struck by an automobile while riding his bicycle, and that also follows his slow, painful attempts to recover some damaged, recognizable version of his former self. That is Denton Welch’s extraordinary A Voice Through a Cloud, his last novel, published unfinished and posthumously in 1950.”
[UPDATE: The Literary Saloon has a nice overview of the Slow Man coverage thus far.]
Sounds rather harsh coming from the woman who gave us “Blue Angel,” wherein, surprise of surprises, a writing professor gets a hard-on for his student. Library journal summarizes it thus: “An autobiographical writer in the throes of a mid-life crisis, he feels he’s suffocating in his comfortable, boring job at a small New England college, stuck with a predictable wife, a sullen daughter, and a life that offers him nothing to write about. So he becomes entranced by his most talented student, Angela, a girl with numerous facial piercings who can spin a page-burning novel out of her imagination.” FP’s piece is actually pretty interesting, but is she really in a position to attack another writer for being unoriginal?