Word: alvarez
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...ALVAREZ had set out deliberately to prove the truism that good critics make bad novelists, he could not have devised a more convincing piece of evidence. When a critic turns to fiction writing in middle age, so some lack of burning inspiration may be inevitable, but this novel also shows an ignorance of the most basic tools of storytelling, not to mention an absence of the literary sensibility the author has demonstrated elsewhere. If Alvarez had turned his critical eye on his own work, this manuscript would never have seen the light...
...most Alvarez-like character in Hers, a graying professor of English literature, suffers from a similar blindness when it comes to looking into his own situation. Cuckolded left and right, he is capable only of sniffing at his wife's "roused animal juices" and muttering lines from Othello. The heroine of this book is no Desdemona, but she has the professor thoroughly confused; as the annoyingly well-informed narrator tells us several timer, he is so wrapped up in his books that he can't tell the real thing when it pokes him in the face. It is a cheap...
Polemics aside, hers aims to be a profound account of a woman's journey toward a sensual awakening, but Alvarez's small repertoire of narrative gestures is inadequate to create an interesting, surface, let alone psychological depth. Julie is a "waiflike" creature whose husband, despite his stuffiness, manages to have a sensuality "as massive and crushing as a Centurion tank." As the story begins, she is tolerating a routine of more-or-less intermittent rape; soon she is submitting a bit more cheerfully to one of her husband's students, Sam; by the end of the book she has left...
...father has been mentioned. It bears all the earmarks of a shattering revelation: Julie breaks down post coitum and sobs, the weather obliges with a rainstorm to maintain the right mood, and the chapter comes to an end. But it is revelation in a vacuum, unexpected and without point Alvarez never created a sense that anything needed revealing. There is no mystery or tension in this book, because nothing is hidden, and nothing is unexplained...
...results of the elections for class marshals of the Radcliffe Class of 1976 are: Teresita Alvarez of Quincy House. First Marshal; and Jane E. Borthwick of Eliot House, Susan S. Handy of Mather House, and Margaret C. Ross of Lowell House, Class Marshals...