London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (review)
only ones short on scholarship; sociologist Joy Rudd cites no sources and insults the intelligence of many readers by explaining the Literary Revival and the Easter Rising from scratch. The inclusion of more than twenty generally short essays makes for a fragmented reading experience. What we still need, beyond these collections of essays, is a more unified, focused examination of Big House fiction. In The Literary Works of Jack B. Yeats, John W. Purser, a freelance composer and writer, sets out to make a case that Jack Yeats's plays and novels are excellent in their own right and have suffered neglect in the shadow of his big brother. But he does not make a convincing case. The following quotation on the novel The Charmed Life is all too typical of Purser's approach and style: "Truly, this is a work of genius ... I am myself humbled ... I can only hope what I have done will serve as sufficient stimulus for others to look more deeply into the unlimited treasures of this great novel." Jack Yeats's novels remain forgettable after reading Purser. The Yeats scholar might forgive him if some meaningful connections were made between the painter's writings and those of his older brother the poet, but Purser does not make diem. This book was completed two years earlier as a dissertation (which Purser oddly cites parenthetically, confusing the reader until the dissertation is found in a list of abbreviations at the beginning of the book). He identifies the oft-cited Sarah Purser, a friend of Jack Yeats, as his own great-grand-aunt only on this book's penultimate page, and his notes appear after his bibliography, in which articles are listed by title rather than author. This quirky book is not up to the level of the previous four titles in the "Princess Grace Irish Library."