Word: 20s
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...earlier volume, Exiles, Arlen was a prep school Telemachus, searching for the truth about his late parent, author of The Green Hat and other best-selling novels of the '20s, who had succumbed to writer's block, deprecation and obscurity. In that poignant volume the son could only compile small sorrows and acts of redemption. However acute, Exiles was the work of a miniaturist. In Passage to Ararat, Arlen set himself a near-Homeric task: the recovery of a forgotten people. To accomplish that mission he has performed a series of brilliancies: his research is irreproachable...
...exception of an extended balletic sequence called "Broadway Melody," in which Kelly and Cyd Charisse slink around with lithe, animal sensuality. The ballet is a self-contained entity that has nothing to do with the plot, and its unmistakable 50s jazziness is completely out of the movie's 20s context. Kelly seems to have had a good idea for a dance number and just thrown it in as lagniappe, but it stands up well...
Other modes, indeed: card sharping? bunco artistry? Hargrave's mischievous novel Clara Reeve purports to be the memoir of a young Englishwoman from 1850, when she was six, through the years of a preposterous marriage in her early 20s. Many novels attempt to be what they are not-the log of a whaling voyage, the writhings of a student who murders an old pawnbroker-and thus all are stratagems of a kind. But Hargrave's, Moore's and Crichton's constructs are far more elaborate, since they soberly imitate the genteel literary conventions and taboos...
...needed resiliency to survive. Her youth was permanently maimed by a suffocating, overambitious mother who called her only "Little Precious." Her puerile "maturity" was filled with weeks of chain-smoking and drinking straight gin. Carson was hardly into her 20s when she suffered the first of several strokes. Anemia, pleurisy, a rheumatic heart and cancer followed in lethal succession. She was afflicted with a melodramatic bisexuality, a condition that made her fall in love with husbands and wives. Like the protagonist in her story A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud, she could say: "Son, I can love anything." Nevertheless, Biographer...
...light verse. Milne writes with wit and humane perception about his later relationship with his father. In a space hardly larger than a Pooh book, he has, in fact, unobtrusively condensed a mini-memoir, a portrait of A.A. Milne, a bittersweet study of a literary celebrity in the '20s and something very like an annotated Winnie-the-Pooh. It is pure HUNNY all the way to the bottom...