"This boy comes riding with his arms high and wide, his head dipped
low, his ass light in the saddle, as if about to be shot into orbit
from a forked sling... The line down the center of the road is the
zipper, and he is the zip." This is another of Mr. Morris' hit and
run horror stories with lots of oblique philosophy and
not-so-abstract symbolism. The boy, Jubal is a mindless creature,
"supernatural" in his primitive instinctiveness. He cycles into
Pickett, Indiana and proceeds to devastate the local natives who
respond with "pleasurable apprehension" after he rapes a simple
minded old woman, bops the town "A-C" on the head, and knifes the
hardware store man who is all too eager to hear the details of the
rape. The various thrilled-fascinated reactions to his presence are
summed up in one character's statement: "Bit of the mad dog in us
all." That is what Mr. Morris sees and in effect communicates. He
works with the moment, allowing instinct to override motivation, a
convenient technique but the effect is hardly lasting. Particularly
when he throws in such doggerel as "who gives the twist to the
wind?"... "One man's twister is another man's vacuum." Which nature
abhors. So might the reader.?? (Kirkus Reviews)
"In the space of one day, Jubal E. Gainer, high school dropout and
draft dodger, manages to rack up an impressive array of crimes...He
steals a friend's motorcycle, rapes a simple-minded spinster, mugs
a pixyish professor, and stabs an obese visionary who runs a
surplus store. He then waits out an Indiana twister and goes his
way, leaving as much wreckage in his path as the twister
itself."--Library Journal. "In Orbit is a short novel, full of
action, and the seriousness can mostly be found between the lines.
[There] one can see against what Jubal Gainer's rebellion,
thoughtless and aimless as it seems, is directed. One might say
that he is, like millions of his contemporaries, a Huck Finn
without a Mississippi."-- Granville Hicks, Saturday Review. "Here
is another of Wright Morris's craftsmanly novels--terse,
colloquial, restrained, fragmented, deliberately shadowy. Above
all, small; not slight, not inconsequential, but a miniature...All
readers will surely appreciate the quality of the prose style one
has come to expect in a Wright Morris novel...There is also a
muscular quality to Mr. Morris's writing that makes it a suitable
instrument for conveying harsher things; and there is his sense of
the comic, which springs up constantly. In all, this is a quiet but
rich performance."--New York Times Book Review. One of the most
distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote
thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the
National Book Award.
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