Word: delbancos
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...Delbanco's underwhelming explication is by no means limited to his protagonists: a certain sense of abruptness pervades Old Scores. The frequent, dramatic changes are never foreshadowed and are rarely discussed for more than a sentence. Beth suddenly gets married; years later her husband suddenly announces he is gay; Sally suddenly demands biographical information from her biological mother Beth...
This lack of precision is maddening, especially where emotions are concerned. "Renouncing her calmly, [Ballard] sent [Beth] away," Delbanco notes when, after the accident, Ballard distances himself emotionally from Beth. No other explanation for his sudden termination of the affair is given. Equally inexplicably, it is shortly after the accident that Beth discovers she's pregnant and chooses not to tell Ballard but to give the baby up for adoption. Delbanco explains that Beth "was twenty-one, an adult...[who was] in control of things and could make up her own mind...
These unconvincing and relatively unimportant events, fleetingly described, contribute to a vague fuzziness that engulfs the book by the last few chapters. When Delbanco relates the central events that lead to the book's close, the fuzziness degenerates into a sense of sheer bewilderment. Even Delbanco, one feels, no longer understands his characters...
...elegant style could have salvaged even this book, but Delbanco's prose comes up short. Delbanco seems unsure how best to tell his story, so he tells it all ways. Old Scores is a pastiche of almost every type of novel imaginable. Various passages belong to college novels, bodice-rippers, epistolary novels and memoirs...
Sometimes Delbanco seems almost to have written drama or stand-up comedy--many of his phrases would sound droll if read aloud in a performance. Delbanco, a colleague of Ballard's, writes, had had a marriage that "had gone on the rocks because of the rocks in his glass. The ones that he covered with Scotch...