{"id":1703,"date":"2013-05-25T16:21:35","date_gmt":"2013-05-26T00:21:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1703"},"modified":"2013-07-07T17:16:00","modified_gmt":"2013-07-08T01:16:00","slug":"review-when-captain-flint-was-still-a-good-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=1703","title":{"rendered":"Review: When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nick Dybek&#8217;s <em>When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man<\/em> is a solid literary work.\u00a0 He takes a claustrophobic hide-bound town and the strained relationships inside it and makes it something both mythic and small.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a story of place and time more than character, but the place and time are worth a look.<\/p>\n<p>His characters are solid, but not stunningly original.\u00a0 They are creatures of his small fishing town and more personify parts of it than exist on their own.\u00a0 He has passages where the narrator looks back from where he gets to later, but one sees clearly that he&#8217;s a different person than the one experiencing the events in the novel. The time and place are the stars.<\/p>\n<p>The time is the time when a young person decides who he&#8217;s going to be &#8211; to the extent that he has a say in that decision.\u00a0 His protagonist is reactive, as most are then, but introspective enough to make the transformation interesting.\u00a0 Similarly the setting is condensed enough to make nearly every action symbolic.<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately, Dybek has an even hand and an ear for dialog, so that the symbolism stays clear but not hackneyed.\u00a0 The larger meanings are never hidden, but never overwhelm the story&#8217;s rhythm.\u00a0 The story is a good yarn with some grand gestures.<\/p>\n<p>Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nick Dybek&#8217;s When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man is a solid literary work.\u00a0 He takes a claustrophobic hide-bound town and the strained relationships inside it and makes it something both mythic and small.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a story of place and time more than character, but the place and time are worth a look. His [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1703"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1747,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703\/revisions\/1747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}