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Book Reviews 321 A.D. CHOUDHURY. The Face 0/ Illusion in American Drama. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press 1979. Pp. 148. In his introduction to The Face 0/ Illusion in American Drama, A.D. Choudhuri recognizes that "This sort of study imposes a special kind of restraint on the author.... But what is lost in terms of breadth and freedom of exercise is, perhaps, gained in sharpness, concentration, and close analysis; for the limited area of investigation stimulates economy and brevity in place of lengthy explanation, concentration on the particular rather than generalized observations, sharpness of focus in preference to the formulation of broad characteristics." Such sensible intentions seem especially apt in a study of a body of drama particularly vulnerable to an assortment of biographical, sociological and aesthetic claims: would that they had been realized - even in the tireless redundancy of this very sentence, an unfortunately steady characteristic of Choudhuri's prose style throughout. In the introduction, and the following chapter entitled "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness," Choudhuri stalks American life, seeking out the "phenomenon of illusion" which, he asserts, is more keenly felt by the American mind than the European. For this hunt, he is armed, in part, with the observations of such foreign visitors as Dickens, Henry Sienkiewicz, Hector St. Joho de Crevacoeur and Alexis de Tocqueville, with an assortment of contemporary social critics (among them Daniel Bell, Vance Packard and David Riesman), with a selection of American novels and plays, and with an image of Hollywood's role in creating what Harold Rosenberg once called "social hallucination" which would startle anyone who has followed the American film for the past twenty years. Throughout the first section of this book, Choudhuri's tone ranges from that of a mourner deeply regretting that things American turned out the way they did, to that of a social therapist condescendingly urging the "greater quantum of the kindness of the human soul" to rise up and overcome the "demands of a competitive ethos." One can sense his spirit alternately rising and falling as he attempts to assimilate a wide assortment of impressioris of American thought, social behaviour, commerce, art and reHgion into what is finally a rather commonplace thesis regarding the American dramatist's "concern with illusion and reality." This concern, he observes, "expresses his culture's reality; an unstructured culture, deeply divided against itself, frantically embracing the shadows of a past dream while failing to create vital lifegiving myths and visions." The prophetic and the pathological dimensions of the "American Dream" are, of course, hardly new territory fer the social or the literary critic; they certainly have not escaped very many who have written specifically about the American drama of the twentieth century. Choudhuri's presentation of these observations to which criticism is habituated is interspersed with some rather forced, insensitive, and, at times, just plain erroneous accounts of Chekhov, Ibsen and "the quiet settled centre of British plays" which, one supposes, were necessary to bring in in order to demonstrate a cultural and artistic uniqueness in the body of drama which is examined in the second part of the book. 322 Book Reviews What follows are six loosely connected essays on Rice's The Adding Machine, Odets's Golden Boy, O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, Miner's Death of a Salesman, Williams's The Glass Menagerie, and Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? These essays do not vary much in tone or quality. The plays are "read" thoroughly, and American passions for such things as conformity, money, success, and "personal attractiveness" are identified, and the "face of illusion" is intermittently explored - but to what end? The essays offer no new insights into these plays or playwrights; the sociological and cultural observations are either commonplace: or else, one suspects, simply guesswork. The readings of Odets's Golden Boy or Miller's Death of a Salesman might be entirely satisfactory as undergraduate lectures on the pJays, but hardly warrant publication as part of a book. GERALD D. PARKER, UN1VERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO SAMUEL J . BERNSTEIN. The Strands Entwined: A New Direction in American Drama. Boston: Northeastern University Press 1980. Pp. xii, 171. Samuel J. Bernstein...

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