The Great Pretender (Contemporary American Fiction) - Softcover

This is no Portnoy's Complaint , but Atlas's comic Jewish first novel does have its moments, especially early on when 1960s adolescent Ben Janis yearns for girls and literary fame in suburban Chicago. To please his pretentious father (they exchange Eliot quotations at the dinner table), Ben goes to an Auden reading when he'd rather watch "Leave It to Beaver." He sends his poems to the New Yorker. He goes to Harvard, where he cultivates the famous visiting poet, and to Oxford, where he lives uncomfortably with his aspiring-novelist lover, who leaves him. Still yearning for girls and literary fame, Ben goes home again, to a job as a staff writer for Time. More an extended shtick than a story of substance and drama, The Great Pretender successfully sustains its comic tone but doesn't really engage the reader. Atlas is the author of Delmore Schwartz: the life of an American poet . Janet Wiehe, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty.
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