Word: bellower
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Paradise may not be a masterpiece. Cheever's characters, after all, are thin, doll-like creations next to those of his colleagues Updike and Bellow. And even though the novella has a broader vision than one might otherwise expect from Cheever, it still lacks the acute moral curiosity one expects from a greater writer. He still yields to the impulse to pattern events, to make a sort of literary bon-bon although this one is finely textured and eminently palatable...
...Dean's December, Bellow...
Some of the previous lectures have been writer and poet Robert Penn Warren. Paul Freund, Loeb University Professor Emeritus, novelist Saul Bellow, and historian Barbara Tuchman...
There are plenty more, and Bellow again demonstrates his keen sense of how all these disparate people are thrown, indeed, bonded together over huge distances and years. Even in this his "dark" book. Bellow shows a strong instinct for seeking out and lauding the crumbs of humanity he finds in the interstices of an inhuman world. The appearance of crowds of Valeria's friends at her funeral dressed in the threadbare finery they saved from the pre-way years is an occasion for quiet joy. And in the give-and-take between Corde and his wife. Bellow demonstrates his acute...
...Saul Bellow falters somewhat in The Dean's December. It will not stand as his best book, probably not even one of his best three of four. It is, nonetheless, reassuring in a strange way that the shortcomings of the work are due to experimentation and imperfect exploration and not to any diminution of the genius which made him one of the country's finest writers...