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Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 279 из 359But that is a small part of the total work; in most cases Bradbury carries his story off with guts and beauty and panache .
And it might be worth remembering that Theodore Dreiser, the author of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy , was, like Bradbury, sometimes his own worst enemy . . . mostly because Dreiser never knew when to stop. "When you open your mouth, Stevie," my grandfather once said to me in despair, "all your guts fall out." I had no reply to that then, but I suppose if he were alive today, I would reply: That's 'cause I want to be Theodore Dreiser when I grow up. Well, Dreiser was a great writer, and Bradbury seems to be the fantasy genre's version of Dreiser, although Bradbury's line-by-line writing is better and his touch is lighter. Still, the two of them share a remarkable commonality.
On the minus side, both show a tendency to not so much write about a subject as to bulldoze it into the ground . . . and once so bulldozed, both have a tendency to bludgeon the subject until all signs of movement have ceased. On the plus side, both Dreiser and Bradbury are American naturalists of a dark persuasion, and in a crazy sort of way they seem to bookend Sherwood Anderson, the American champ of naturalism. Both of them wrote of American people living in the heartland ( although Dreiser's heartland people come to the city while Bradbury's stay to home), of innocence coming heartbreakingly to experience ( although Dreiser's people usually break, while Bradbury's people remain, although changed, whole), and both speak in voices which are uniquely, even startlingly American. Both narrate in a clear English which remains informal while mostly eschewing idiom-when Bradbury lapses occasionally into slang it startles us so much that he seems almost vulgar. Their voices are unmistakably American voices.
*Not much new in this. Writers in the fantasy and science fiction genres moan about the critical coverage they get from mainstream critics-sometimes with justification, sometimes without-but the fact is most critics inside the genre are intellectual corks. The genre magazines have a long and ignoble history of roasting novels which are too large for the genres from which they've come; Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land took a similar pasting.
The easiest difference to point out, and maybe the most unimportant, is that Dreiser is called a realist while Bradbury is known as a fantasist.
And it might be worth remembering that Theodore Dreiser, the author of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy , was, like Bradbury, sometimes his own worst enemy . . . mostly because Dreiser never knew when to stop. "When you open your mouth, Stevie," my grandfather once said to me in despair, "all your guts fall out." I had no reply to that then, but I suppose if he were alive today, I would reply: That's 'cause I want to be Theodore Dreiser when I grow up. Well, Dreiser was a great writer, and Bradbury seems to be the fantasy genre's version of Dreiser, although Bradbury's line-by-line writing is better and his touch is lighter. Still, the two of them share a remarkable commonality.
On the minus side, both show a tendency to not so much write about a subject as to bulldoze it into the ground . . . and once so bulldozed, both have a tendency to bludgeon the subject until all signs of movement have ceased. On the plus side, both Dreiser and Bradbury are American naturalists of a dark persuasion, and in a crazy sort of way they seem to bookend Sherwood Anderson, the American champ of naturalism. Both of them wrote of American people living in the heartland ( although Dreiser's heartland people come to the city while Bradbury's stay to home), of innocence coming heartbreakingly to experience ( although Dreiser's people usually break, while Bradbury's people remain, although changed, whole), and both speak in voices which are uniquely, even startlingly American. Both narrate in a clear English which remains informal while mostly eschewing idiom-when Bradbury lapses occasionally into slang it startles us so much that he seems almost vulgar. Their voices are unmistakably American voices.
*Not much new in this. Writers in the fantasy and science fiction genres moan about the critical coverage they get from mainstream critics-sometimes with justification, sometimes without-but the fact is most critics inside the genre are intellectual corks. The genre magazines have a long and ignoble history of roasting novels which are too large for the genres from which they've come; Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land took a similar pasting.
The easiest difference to point out, and maybe the most unimportant, is that Dreiser is called a realist while Bradbury is known as a fantasist.