But first, of course, Jackie must learn some valuable lessons about the price of success and struggle with the inner conflict between her generous, honorable impulses and her ravenous ambition.
Virtually all of the young men drinking beer, shooting the breeze and killing an afternoon in Ms. Smith's play can be viewed in lights both positive and negative, which is a credit to the playwright's appreciation of the complicated mixture of honorable and dishonorable impulses in all of us.
His impulse is honorable, but one wishes he had been tougher-minded.
The impulse that drives the piece is honorable, but the rapid switching among characters is awkward, the insertion of period poetry less than seamless, and a sense of solipsism pervasive, as when the suburban character says, "Frankly, I can't think about my next facial peel when there are so many human beings suffering around the world".
Your primary impulse when writing about real people is to be honorable and truthful, to responsibly separate fact from conjecture.
Where Carson explained running away from his apprenticeship with a six-word shrug ("The business did not suit me"), Peters squared his shoulders and roared, "Saddlery is an honorable employment; but saddlery never made a greater mistake than when it strove to hitch to its traces the bold impulse, the wild yearning, the sinewy muscle of Kit Carson".
But there is usually one fully imagined character in Bellow's books, one character whose impulses the author understands and sympathizes with, whose sufferings elicit his compassion, and whose virtues and defects, egotism and self-doubt, honorable intentions and less than honorable expediencies are examined with surgical precision and unflinching honesty.
These are honorable aims.
