Word: authority
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...reader who picks up a book on, say, unidentified flying objects, knows that he is not going to be told, on the first page, that flying saucers are imaginary. The author has an advance from his publisher, and he is going to see the thing through, complete with wiring diagrams and interviews with little green men. The case of the beatniks is similar; the unwashed T shirts are tangible enough, but is there anything new, socio-religio-artistically speaking, inside them? The author of this Baedeker to Beatland says, naturally, that there is. The barbarians, he reports, are within...
...Author Lipton, a minor poet and novelist (Rainbow at Midnight, In Secret Battle), is well situated to serve as middleman between the beatniks and the squares. He owns a necktie, and he lives in a seaside slum of Los Angeles called Venice West, which is as cool and beat as a mentholated eggnog. Lipton himself is not really beat, but because of his advanced age (58) and full refrigerator, he is allowed to serve as Big Dada to the tribe...
...note to his publisher, the writer of this ironic romance observes that "I guess I'm the least known author of my ability in America." The titles of some of his previous books (Gestalt Therapy, Art and Social Nature) suggest why. But in this novel, Author Goodman shows an impressive gift for fiction. His prose is strong-flavored and exact, his comedy is caustic. Still, for all its humor, The Empire City bulges like a diplodocus. The first of its four overlong, sometimes aimless books was begun in 1939, and Goodman says he may yet write another volume...
...servant to an old man named Knott, but his duties are vague, and he and his master have never exchanged a word. That is Author Beckett's way of showing the measureless distance between man and his fellow. But Watt's distance from himself is even greater. Not for him the prescription, "Know thyself"; the little he knows about himself he hates. He also hates other things, especially the earth and the sky. The closest he has ever come to companionship is with a man who shares his hatred of birds and love of rats. To the rats...
...terrible vision, a style that is by turns irritatingly dense and craftily simple. And he states and restates his nightmare with a relentlessness that makes most writers seem uncertain of their way. Yet the vision is too ghastly to be borne in the long run, and with Watt, Author Beckett has conjured it up about as many times as most readers will be able to stand. If Godot was really Beckett's way of saying God, perhaps the only solution for him and his work lies not in waiting but in searching for Godot...