Riding the Dragon - In this coming-of-age tale, Lee Durkee sympathetically probes the dreams, addictions, and forbidden quests of a rootless adolescent.(Review) (book review)

World and I, July, 2001 by GINGHER, ROBERT

Robert Gingher has written widely on twentieth-century American and British literature. South watcher and editor of The Rough Road Home, an anthology of southern writers, he teaches at Ridgefield Academy in Greensboro, North Carolina.

 Book Info:RIDES OF THE MIDWAY 

Lee Durkee

Publisher:New York: W.W. Norton, 2001

316 pp., $25.95

The world's oldest story centers around conflict and return. It gauges loss, adventure, resistance to change, and allows character and reader to "come back home" with new eyes, ears, and hearts. The mystery of why we're here and what else, being here, we should seek, urges the earliest calisthenics of quest. Even in ritual children's games like peekaboo and hide-and-seek, we flirt with the missing, then run...