Book Review

BOOKS OF THE TIMES

Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher

1983

Overview

SAMUEL RICHARDSON once wrote of ''Tristram Shandy'' that it was filled with ''unaccountable wildness; whimsical incoherencies; uncommon indecencies.'' The same might be said of [John Sack]'s ''Fingerprint,'' an uneven, idiosyncratic autobiography roughly modeled on Laurence Sterne's classic. These diatribes against modern society eventually engulf the story of Mr. Sack's own life. What's more, ''Fingerprint'' suffers from the same thing that marred ''M,'' the author's otherwise excellent book on the Vietnam War - namely, a reductive tendency to regard all that is American as debased and corrupt. ''I didn't know if I'd been born in America, AMERICA, Amerika, or some satellite of Antares,'' he writes in ''Fingerprint,'' ''but I knew I had been delivered into a great dictatorship or, as the kids in the 1960's would say, a fascist state.'' Hyperbolic statements like that simply undermine the rest of Mr. Sack's arguments and lend the black humor of the book an unnecessarily paranoid tone.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: AKSYONOV, VASSILY / ALCOHOLISM / Alexander, Shana / Anno, Mitsumasa / ASHTON, DORE / AUTHORS / Barrett, William / Barthelme, Donald / Barthes, Roland (1915-1980) / BASEBALL / Bettelheim, Bruno / BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION / Blake, John / Bleriot, Louis / Blom, Benjamin / Bok, Sissela / BOOKS AND LITERATURE / Born, Nicolas / Boyle, R Alexander / Boyle, Robert / Bradbury, Malcolm / Broyard, Anatole / Brzezinski, Zbigniew / Bunuel, Luis / Byron, William / Calvino, Italo (1923-1985) / Cantrell, Almarine / Carter, Jimmy / Caruso, Enrico / Carv, Raymond / Carver, Raymond / Chaplin, Charlie / CHILDREN AND YOUTH / CIVIL WAR AND GUERRILLA WARFARE / Cook, Robin / COOKING AND COOKBOOKS / Cowley, Malcolm / Crandall, Jud / Crosby, John / Dardis, Tom / De Vries, Peter / DEATH / Del Sarto, Andrea / Didion, Joan / Dodds-Parker, Douglas / Doerr, Harriet / Eco, Umberto (1932-2016) / Edel, Leon (1907-1997) / Eisenhower, Dwight David / English language / Everton, Sara / FAMILIES AND FAMILY LIFE / Fitzgerald, F Scott / Forster, E M / Francis, Dick / Freud, Sigmund / Garcia Marquez, Gabriel (1927-2014) / Gardner, John (1933-1982) / GEOLOGY / Glendinning, Victoria / GOLDBERGER, PAUL / GOODMAN, WALTER / Greene, Graham / Greenfeld, Howard / Greenfield, Robert / Groelz, Henry / GROVE, ANDREW S / Harris, Anita / Harris, Jean / Harrison, Gilbert A / HAYES, THOMAS C / Hayman, Ronald (1932-2019) / Heat-Moon, William Least / Hedren, Tippi / Heminway, John / Heng, Liang / Hersh, Seymour M / HISTORY / Hitchcock, Alfred (1899-1980) / Hoban, Russell / HODGES, ANDREW / HOUSEMAN, JOHN / Innes, Michael (1906-1994) / Kahn, Jerry / KAKUTANI, MICHIKO / Keaton, Buster / KENNEDY, WILLIAM (AUTHOR) / Kennedy, William III / Kermode, Frank / KING, FRANCIS / King, Stephen (1947- ) / Kipling, Rudyard / Kissinger, Henry A / Kolb, Philip / LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGES / Laschen, Georg / LEHMANN-HAUPT, CHRISTOPHER / Lenteric, Bernard / Leonard, Elmore (1925-2013) / LIQUOR / Liszt, Franz / Lloyd, Harold / Lydia, Nina / Lynn, Kenneth S / Lyons, Nick / Mailer, Norman / Mainwaring, Dulcie / Malamud, Bernard / Manheim, Ralph / Marshall, James / Mayer, Louis B / McPhee, John / Merrill, James Ingram (1926-1995) / Mewshaw, Michael (1943- ) / MIDDLETON, DREW / Millar, Margaret (1915-1994) / Miller, Nathan / Montagu, Mary Wortley (1689-1762) / Moorhouse, Geoffrey / Morris, Wright (1910-1998) / MURDERS AND ATTEMPTED MURDERS / MUSIC / Nicolson, Harold / Nixon, Richard M / Obrian, Luko / OPERA / Paget, Henry William / Phelps, Robert / Phillips, William / Porter, Katherine Anne / PROFESSIONAL ATHLETICS / Proust, Marcel (1871-1922) / PSYCHOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGISTS / Pym, Barbara / Rahv, Philip / REVIEWS / Rickey, Branch / Robinson, Jackie / Roosevelt, Franklin Delano / Ross, Philip / Rutherfurd, Lucy Mercer / Sack, John / Sackville-West, Vita / Santayana, George / Sarkissian, Ben / Sayre, Zelda / Schwartz, Lynne Sharon / Seabury, Samuel / Selz, Irene Mayer / Selznick, David O / Selznick, Irene Mayer / Shandy, Tristram / Shapiro, Judith / Siviero, Rodolfo / Smith, Lee / Spoto, Donald / Stam, Barry / Sterling, Claire / Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768) / Stowe, William W / Straub, Peter / Stryker, Sol / Suvorov, Viktor / SUVOROV, VIKTOR (PSEUDONYM) / Sykes, Christopher Simon / Tarnower, Herman / Thalberg, Sigismond / THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA. A JOURNEY AROUND GREAT BRITAIN (BOOK) / Theroux, Paul / Thrasher, Anthony / TITLES / Trillin, Calvin / Trilling, Diana / Trilling, Lionel / Truman, Margaret / Tygiel, Jules / Tyrone, James / Van Heeren, Alex / Vance, Cyrus R / Vendler, Helen / Vennewitz, Leila / Vot, Le / Walker, Alan / WAR AND REVOLUTION / Watson, Peter / Weaver, William / Wheeler, April / Wilder, Thornton / Wills, Garry / Wilson, Edmund (1895-1972) / WOMEN / Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941) / Writers / WRITING AND WRITERS / Wurgaft, Lewis D / Yates, Brock / Yates, Richard