Word: authorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...best: "Most often, [Girl in Landscape] reads like a children's book for adults," a description hardly convincing for admirers of the silky lushness of, say, the novels of Rushdie or Morrison. Much more than style, however, the ideas expounded in the novel and the way author Jonathan Lethem structures them raise this book to its own, medium-high pedestal. At the most basic level, the novel is a literary reenactment of John Ford's 1956 Western The Searchers, which serves both as a tribute to the Great American cinematic genre of the Western and as a questioning of American...
...adventures as she ponders the heavier questions of life, such as which men she should have sex with and when. No, really, there are some serious issues that are addressed in the book, but they are overshadowed by the dominance of superficiality--the great deal of time that the author spends living at a pensionaire full of international fashion models, the author's barhopping and picking up of various men, her obsession with a Greek basketball player who cruelly mistreats her, her rather interesting visit to a Greek gynecologist--all of these little adventures add up to next to nothing...
What on earth could have inspired Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning (not to mention New York Times best-selling) author, to begin her latest work with such a verbose, grammatically-clumsy sentence? An attempted strive for originality in the increasingly-formulaic world of American literature? A desire to jump to the opposite end of the writing spectrum--or, in this case, to an entirely different dimension--than that of her last piece Moo, about a corrupt university? Most importantly, does Smiley's new take on an old-fashioned technique of writing work...
John Rickard is the visiting professor of Australian Studies and the author of Australia: A Cultural History. He is happy to talk to any student with either a research or travel interest in Australia. His e-mail address is jrickard@fas.harvard.edu...
...editorial board welcomes unsolicited manuscripts. They can be e-mailed to editorial@thecrimson.harvard.edu, faxed to (617) 576-9393 or sent to The Harvard Crimson, 14 Plympton St., Cambridge, MA 02138. Submissions should be 700 to 1,000 words in length and should note the author's Harvard affiliation (if any), contact information and relevant credentials. If your work is chosen for publication, an editor will contact...