Piling up words to boredom

Press, 30 May 1987, Page 23

Piling up words to boredom

Testing the Current. By William McPherson. Paladin, 1986. 319 pp. $18.95 (paperback).

(Reviewed by Alan Conway)

McPherson is on the staff of the “Washington Post” and in 1977 won a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. This is his first novel. It is an account of middle-class, Midwestern life in the Depression years as seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy. The author sticks doggedly to his belief, as expressed in a quotation from Stendahl, that only with more and more detail is there any originality and truth. This may be fine for McPherson, but after a hundred

pages or so the reader is left waving a white flag of surrender to boredom. In some respects his obsession with detail is admirable, but it makes for dull reading. This is not the world of wonder and excitement which an eight-year-old would see, even in the American Midwest, but the somewhat tedious childhood recollections of an adult.

As literature it is probably superior to “Adrian Mole” but it has none of the vitality and humour of Sue Townshend’s writing. It is a cliche to say that a first novel is generally autobiographical but, if McPherson were to re-write this novel in the first person singular, it might have more of an impact.