| painful day, an enemy from whom there was no escape, and to face that enemy in a terrible war of attrition. That John could do this, while at the same time bringing a new, intensified, keener sense of life to everyone he touched in that last fateful, yes, shining season, is a story as filled with hope (in spite of the fact that there was no hope in the physical sense) as it is with anguish. |
| When I finished reading A Shining Season that November night in 1979, I mused for a while on who owed what to whom. I know Bill would be the first to admit that as an author he was in debt to John Baker, but John, too, owes something back for the way Bill told his story. |
| Essayist Annie Dillard makes a stunningly simple distinction between two kinds of writers. There are those, she says, who dazzle us, or try to dazzle us. "Watch my hand," they say, calling our attention to their artful manicure. The others tell us to look where they are pointing, steering us not to them, but to the thing which really mattersthe story. Bill is that second kind of writer, self-effacing, modest, the kind of writer who respects the reader's intelligence; he makes no judgments. His prose is clear, direct, uncluttered; newcomers to A Shining Season will be astonished at how swiftly they are led through the John Baker story without their having missed a single important thing. |
| I suppose some critic, somewhere, someday, might in a careless moment call Bill Buchanan a "regional" writer. |
| That careless comment would be absolutely true. |
| He is a regional writer; his region is the human heart. |
| Bill Buchanan recognizes, as Housman did in his poem, that the death of a young runner is not an altogether tragic happening, not when what the runner leaves behind when he sets, "before the echoes fade, the fleet foot to the sill of shade," is so much more |
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