The details “grisly”, the people “lunatic”, the results, “magnetic”. |
Viewpoint It Happened in Boston?
“Artists and Madmen” The Wall Street Journal © Nov 2, 1969 Edmund Fuller |
“Dostoyevsky posed the famous dilemma: “Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature….and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?” The Dostoyevskian answer is “No.” The narrator of “It Happened in Boston?” goes the other way… Pity and terror mix with comedy; suspense with reverie. And a question haunts us: What happens, really? Where do events and the narrator’s mind part ways?” |