Books: Aboriginal Calamity

THE DEAD SEAGULL (142 pp.)—George Barker—Farrar, Sfraus & Young ($2.50).

"What depth of shame do we lie in," muses the hero of The Dead Seagull, "when we sink back on the plush cushions of our disgust and sigh? It is the dog going back to his vomit, attracted to it by a simple miracle: it is his own."

George Barker's novel is the story of a sick young dog who would rather sniff in his misery than get well. As such, it is a reekingly unpleasant book; when the author waxes lyrical and theological about his nasty little mess, it becomes a conceited...

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