Word: author
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Still, Coates's Watsons has two virtues. One is purely malicious: bits of it can be read aloud to fanatical Janeites to see if they can guess the true author. The other virtue is that Author Coates has managed to recapture much of the attitude to love and life that Jane Austen once expressed in a single short query: "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn...
...first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, he picks the bones of some old people's lives in whispers. Yet Poorhouse is less concerned with old age than with the clash between the bloodless ideal of social perfectibility and the pungent humanity of the old Adam. On this subject Author Updike's whispers are sibilant with meaning...
...reading about themselves, this strongly appealing book should be enjoyed by legions of women who will see themselves (or at least their neighbors) in its heroine's everyday crises and commonplaces, stupidities and minor conquests, emotions half understood and alternatives wholly missed. Unlike choleric, Mom-baiting Philip Wylie, Author Connell sees the Mom of his first novel as a saccharine, easily swayed and sympathetic character. Far from monstrously dominating her husband and three children, Mrs. Bridge is so tame and timid that her daughter Carolyn says coldly: "Listen, Mother, no man is ever going to push me around...
...Author Connell's novel is an expanded version of a short story that appeared in The Anatomy Lesson (TIME, May 27, 1957), but added incident does not necessarily bring greater understanding. When catastrophe breaks into his heroine's hothouse existence, the author flinches nearly as much as she: the event is seen from the outside, and the reader cannot know if Mrs. Bridge feels any more deeply than the cliches she utters. He is a gentler observer than Philip Wylie, but Connell's conclusions about U.S. womanhood may not be too different...
...prefigure the Second Coming of the Messiah. There is erratic, hard-drinking General Hugh Johnson, who. when he was finally forced to resign from NRA, in his farewell speech to his staff tearfully quoted (in Italian) the lines sung by Madame Butterfly before she commits harakiri. Author Schlesinger also manages a certain amount of humor in describing the great rush of theorists to Washington, including the Agricultural Department lawyer who. on a field trip. saw his first lightning bug and cried: "Good God! What's that...