Steven David Sills
2015
Steven, you should DEFINITELY continue to give your life to . . . literary novels (notice I omitted “obscure”). What you have produced is a phenomenal work. Others, in the past, have attempted to do something like you have done, but they did not come close to creating a work with such breadth and depth as you. I apologize for taking so very long to complete the reading of your work, but it is very densely written in some sections, while others seem to be as lucid as anything I have ever read. Your vocabulary probably exceeds my own (“fulgurant”), for which I am thankful, as I always enjoy being taught the existence of words I have not yet incorporated into my own lexicon. The most successful parts of your work—for me—were the interactions between Luk, Aus, and the central character, as those passages moved the story along. I think using the unrest and waging of police action in Bangkok sets up the intellectual discontent in the rest of the novel, but I would wish for a more balanced unfolding of the story with the intellectual ruminations. The least successful passages for me were sometimes extremely lengthy sentences—see the first page of Chapter 20, for example—which contained so many parenthetical expressions that I would lose the train of thought. But, on the whole, you have included all of the needed requirements of the Graduate School, and you have included, it seems, allusions to all of the major texts of the whole program, including some of your own choice that I would love to see taught (or maybe not) in our program: Look Homeward Angel, The Way of All Flesh, Donne’s poetry, Gorky’s My Childhood, and the work of Thomas Hardy, Ibsen, O’Neill, and Will Durant and that of John Dos Passos, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in 1969 (I still have an autographed copy of his Midcentury), not to mention, of course, the philosophers. I am not sure you needed to include the annotated Works Cited in your Literature Review, but I have left it in, all the same. I do not
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