Click on the covers for more information on the different editions, including their availability. If you cannot view the image, download the most recent version of Flash Player New American Fiction | A Confederate General from Big Sur by Leigh Buchanan Bienen? Although they fall into the same general division as the Lurie and Tyler novels, The People One Knows and A Confederate General from Big Sur resemble discursive essays on search for self. The narrator in The People One Knows feels obliged to avoid both America and love until he can come to bear the image of his face in the glass. And this ambivalence towards himself is based upon his half Negro parentage, which he was brought up to accept with equanimity, only to find that the rest of the world did not share his calm or tranquility on the subject. At least author Boles avoids the obvious clichés of the Negro search for identity, and that is in itself no mean feat, while the vague and aimless observer who describes the events in A Confederate General from Big Sur seems to bounce unfeelingly back from a series of odd and sometimes amusing encounters with fellow eccentrics on the Pacific Coast, without finding either himself or much else of any interest. Transition: An International Review? 5(20) 1965: 46-51 Note: The above is an excerpt from a longer article which includes reviews of The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss, Herzog by Saul Bellow, The People One Knows by Robert Boles, Full Fathom Five by John Stewart Carter, The Higher Animals by H. E. F. Donohue, Leah by Seymour Epstein, A Mother's Kisses by Bruce Jay Friedman, The Nowhere City by Alison Lurie, An American Dream by Norman Mailer, To an Early Grave by Wallace Markfield, Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr., If Morning Ever Comes by Anne Tyler, and A Confederate General from Big Sur by Richard Brautigan.

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