The El Cholo Feeling Passes - Hardcover

Barton, Fredrick

3.81

16 ratings by Goodreads

9780931948787: The El Cholo Feeling Passes

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0931948789 ISBN 13: 9780931948787

Publisher: Peachtree Pub Ltd, 1985

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Richard Janus, a young southerner working for his doctorate at UCLA during the seventies, has trouble adjusting to the changing outlook of his feminist wife, Faith Cleaver

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About the Author:

Award-winning writer and critic Fredrick Barton has authored four novels, a play in verse, and numerous short stories, essays, and reviews. He is currently Provost at the University of New Orleans, and resides in New Orleans, LA.

Review:

This first novel is off to a promising start when the narrator offers an autobiographical tale in lieu of his doctoral thesis in history. But the tale itself is burdened by mundane reminiscences of adolescence; repetitive quarrels between the narrator and his confused, bad-tempered wife; and relentless self-analysis to the tune of a terrible resentment which was growing inside like molten rock grows inside a volcano for years until the moment of its eruption.'' More interesting is the situation: a child of the Fifties finds that by the time he's nearly reached his lifelong professional goals, they are no longer meaningful to him. But essentially the novel is weak: unable to develop some thoughts on the effect of the women's movement on men, and unable to create a sympathetic or fleshed-out protaganist. (Library Journal)

The El Cholo Feeling Passes "a kind of Fear of Flying for men but is more like a Big Chill without the posing and contrivance. In fact, it's not like anything except itself: it feels right, it rings true. (The Saturday Review)

Page by page it's a winner, a great, wide, youthful swoop at reality that compares to visions of James Jones, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth. The El Cholo Feeling Passes is big-and very beautiful. (Los Angeles Times)

The El Cholo Feeling Passes is required reading. As a history of malaise and fragmentation in one character's life, it is more than incisive. As a document of the hysteria following the Sexual Revolution, it is certifiably true. As an absurdist comedy it begs to be compared to Catch-22 or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. (The Times-Picayune)

Little has been written on the male reaction to changing sex roles. The El Cholo Feeling Passes does so as art, not propaganda. For that reason, its vision of sexual strife should be profoundly disturbing to ideologues on both sides of the gender gap. (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

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