gershon hepner - unholy ghost

Coasting wearily on automatic pilot,
freeway apparitioner, unholy ghost,
I’m giving God my number though I doubt He’ll dial it
as long as I feel wasted on the western coast.

Giving an unfavorable review to Philip Roth’s latest novel, Everyman, in the NYT on April 26,2006, Michiko Kakutani writes:
With the exception of his childhood memories of his father's jewelry shop, which possess a touching emotional specificity, this man's story is depicted in spindly, cartoonlike terms: one impossible wife, one saintly wife, one ditsy airhead of a wife; two resentful, sourpuss sons, one doting daughter; several decades in the advertising game, followed by a stint in retirement as an amateur artist. All are delineated in a brusque, summary manner, as if Mr. Roth couldn't be bothered with filling in the details, or wanted to leave those details deliberately vague in a misguided effort to make his hero more of a representative man. The allusions to King Lear — including the doting daughter, whose devotion stands in sharp contrast to the perfidy of the other two children — feel labored and contrived, and instead of adding resonance to this etiolated tale they simply underscore the story's hollowness, the sense that it is a cobbled-together production of a writer coasting wearily along on automatic pilot.

4/26/06

gershon hepner

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/unholy-ghost/