The Drifters
New York: Random House, 1971. First Edition. Hardcover. 1st edition. Deluxe limited issue, no. 435 of 500 copies, signed, in ink by Michener. Fine in full brown cloth (the correct binding), in fine publisher’s acetate dustjacket and fine slipcase with matching number, all as issued. Fine / fine. Item #474
as that the Miss. Universe winner will be from Earth, and it ends in routine clichés, because it was formulated by a writer who had not experienced the Cultural Revolution from the inside and was doomed to remain a trespasser. But Michener could really write, and he knew how to use steadfast nouns, fanciful verbs, swaggering adjectives, and transitory adverbs, and he felt secure that by making his narrator approximate himself, he could explore, and honestly explain, the enthusiasms, interests, indulgences, tastes and biases of his young travelers. And he did explain them well, but he never understood them because the essence of the 1960s, that became its legacy, remained an incommunicable mystery that Michener never got. His style stayed unaffected, and thus the writing wasn’t incompatible with the subject, but he was blind in his quarantine from the transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic, and ideological change, when the preoccupations of the 1950s had ceased to function and had been replaced with a totally new system of values. So this sort of novel gets written by an author caught in a moment of suspension, a strange and hybrid interregnum, the last gasp of the past, and what was, at the time, a fine novel on the subject and an enchanting insight into the places, is now seen as something quite different from anything Michener intended or fully grasped, a subtle realization of revelation, seldom encountered elsewhere in literature, on the obstacles that blocked cross–generational communication, exposed by a skilled author’s struggles to write about it. After The Drifters he retreated to the strain of books his public loved: Centennial, Chesapeake, etc. And both he and his readers were much happier.
Price:
$250.00