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How Irish canon took a hit when Barrytown's bard lost his muse.(Books)

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From: The Washington Times
Date: 19990926
Author:Sieff, Martin

Leo Tolstoy has a lot to answer for.

Because "War and Peace" is arguably the greatest novel of all time, many reasonably good novelists of the last 130 years have squandered their talents trying to match it in their own cultures. Ironically, the mania has worked best for the lesser talents. Soap operas can gallop on for 1,000 pages or so, but masters of the short story and the novella often appear hapless when they try to apply literary quality control to such vast deserts of text.

So it is with Roddy Doyle. He has produced what, in the days of the 1920s and '30s ...

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