Word: belletristic
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DIED. Frank Swinnerton, 98, novelist, belletrist and chronicler of English literary life for 70 years; in Cranleigh, Surrey, England. Born outside Victorian London, Swinnerton turned out 62 uneven but cheerfully unpretentious books. His intricately plotted, somewhat Victorian novels included Nocturne (1917) and Death of a Highbrow (1961), a book that he and his critics regarded as his best. The agreeable Swinnerton had a gift for making extraordinary friends (among them H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, G.B. Shaw and Aldous Huxley), whose lives he recounted in several spirited but gentlemanly memoirs...
...this shattering climax, Good achieves a high pitch of luminous moral gravity. Venturing beyond easy and merely plausible answers about how a good man succumbs to evil forces, Playwright Taylor has etched the profile of an insidiously disarming process. That process was perhaps best described by Britain's belletrist of metaphysics, C.S. Lewis: "The safest road to Hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts...
Neither the author's older self nor anyone else has mounted a convincing challenge. Updike belongs to the minority that takes his serious poetry seriously. As for the rest, he has his peers, perhaps betters, as a novelist, belletrist, essayist and short-story writer, but they are different people in each case. Updike's versatility has been achieved at some cost. The rules governing his work have remained consistent and deliberately circumscribed. Wit dominates passion; irony mocks the possibility of tragic grandeur. The feelings most likely to seize Updike's comfortably situated people are nostalgia and lust...
...aging literary gents are discovered at wordplay in a womblike Edwardian salon. John Gielgud, the social-climbing guest, is a failed poet and garrulous pub bore. Host Ralph Richardson is a successful but dipsomaniacal belletrist blimp who keeps two menacing servants to guard against just such intrusions. Together these two titled mandarins of the stage are guiding us into Pinter-land, where words struggle to contain the open-ended flux of existence. Our journey through it is brilliantly illuminated by their partnership...
...Vita Sackville-West, the darkly handsome child of a great Kentish family, a minor poet and novelist (The Edwardians). He was Harold Nicolson, cherubic British diplomat, Member of Parliament, brilliant belletrist and historian (Making Peace, Some People). They were married in 1913 and stayed married for nearly half a century, inhabiting a succession of manors and gardens and picturesque ruins. Their union resulted in two gifted children and was for years regarded as the kind of enviable domestic alliance that survives long separation and divergent interests...