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Article: The Feast of Fools.
- Article from:
- World Literature Today
- Article date:
- June 22, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 University of Oklahoma. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In an age of planned literary obsolescence, serious writers can vanish in the cracks between hype and distraction. John David Morley is a very serious writer, abundantly gifted - his work sometimes brings Joyce, sometimes Pynchon to mind - and he rightly demands our fullest attention.
Morley's first work, Pictures from the Water Trade: Adventures of a Westerner in Japan (1985), became an instant hit in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and even in Japan, whose culture it revealed as no recent book has done, except perhaps Ian Buruma's Behind the Mask (1984). Two somber, successive works, In the Labyrinth (1986), a "non-fiction novel," and The Case of Thomas N ...