Let's Kill the Teacher

In its readiness to listen in on the speech of a wide variety of ordinary, working people, and to give us insights into the texture of their daily lives, Dent's writing is not merely unfashionable, it is like very little that is currently being written (or anyway published.) It does however remind me of that fine, scandalously neglected American writer, Nelson Algren. Like Algren, Dent's socialism, while never reductive, is integral to his vision of what life is and what it could be. And like Algren, he makes satisfying stories out of what happens to happen to the kind of people whose existence, when it's noticed at all, is for the most part caricatured or sentimentalized. In other words, Dent testifies to the value of Camus's claim that art is nobody's enemy, because it opens the prisons and gives voice to the sorrows and joys of all. John Lucas