When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. One does not stop to question the madness or the meaning-youth in its blind vision? comic revolution? It's actively, overwhelmingly alive.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. In a final, outlandish and bizarre scene Graft and Gallen indeed bust the zoo with horrendous consequences. We learn of Siggy's death in a motorcycle accident but Graft has his journal and is becoming obsessed with the idea of the zoo. Then there is an abrupt switch to Graft who, with his new girlfriend Gallen, is wandering through Europe. And it's a black humorous sketch of Austria reacting to the war. Interspersed in this midsummer night's diary are lengthy portions of Siggy's 'Highly Selective Autobiography.' The 'Autobiography' is his imaginative recap of the lives of his grandparents and parents before he was born. Schrutt who torments the small mammal house by deliberately setting the animals against each other. The major portion consists of a journal addressed to Graft from Siegfried Javotnik, 'Siggy,' as he spends a long night in a Vienna zoo plotting out details for a 'zoo bust.' His observations center on the night keeper O. A wonderfully fresh, wildly imaginative notion of a book.

John irving bears