Fifteen brief but sensitive vignettes and a longer epilogue by
Blais (Journalism/Univ. of Mass. at Amherst), a Pulitzer-winning
former writer for the Miami Herald. Blais focuses primarily on
"outsiders" - a schizophrenic woman struggling to gain stability, a
teenaged murderer, an 83-year-old WW I vet seeking to have his
dishonorable discharge reversed. One of the most successful pieces
here, reprinted from The Washington Post, concerns Carol Fennelly,
a social activist who continues to head a shelter for the homeless
even though her fellow activist and longtime lover Mitch hanged
himself. Blais captures in haunting images the woman's strength,
her sense of loss, her vulnerability: Fennelly, Blais tells us,
speaks of an earlier marriage in which her husband asked, "Why
can't you be more obedient?" "Dogs are obedient!" Fennelly replied,
dropping to all fours and barking and tugging at his pants cuff
with her teeth. But when Blais depicts a subject who is
"successful," as, for example, in a portrait of an anonymous
$80-an-hour therapist whose life is a manic attempt to juggle
career and motherhood, her plans misfire. Rather than seeing the
woman as admirable, as Blais apparently intends, we perceive her as
self-absorbed and misdirected; in fact, the author admits in an
afterword that this particular article elicited a nearly universal
negative response when it appeared. Nor is Blais much more
successful in her interview with Tennessee Williams, offering
little more than a rehash of the playwright's oft-told tales.
Discussing her own work, Blais writes, "I am most often drawn to
people walking the edge, curiously undefeated." It's in portraying
these marginal lives that she's most effective. (Kirkus Reviews)
From the foreword by Geneva Overholser. What is it about really
fine writers, how they delight, intrigue, compel us? Style, you
say. But style is not something you begin with. Rather, it's what
you end up with, a result of far more fundamental traits. Traits
such as an ear and an eye and a heart, traits that Madeliene Blais
has honed superbly well. This is a book well named: The Heart Is an
Instrument: Portraits in Journalism. The heart is surely first
among Blais's gifts. Whether she is writing about the
famous--playwright tennessee Williams, novelist Mary Gordon--or
about the least elevated among us--a teenage prostitute infected
with the AIDS virus, a homeless schizophrenic--she brings to her
subjects an incomparable empathy.
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