Word: delbancos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Painting by numbers is not particularly taxing. The canvas comes prepainted, and a neat if unimaginative work is guaranteed. Nicholas Delbanco '63 has made literature by the numbers with his new book Old Scores. The prefab plot of star-crossed love between teacher and student serves as his canvas, but a serious mixup occurrs with the paint. Large sections of the completed work remain blank, and the final result is not a thing of beauty. Delbanco has rehashed an old tale with little style and less coherence...
Good writers have made great literature out of simpler stories than this, but they have done so by creating nuanced characters and by sensitively describing complex emotions. Old Scores instead offers one-dimensional characters whose actions seem logical only in Delbanco's brain. Delbanco's underdeveloped characters and general lack of clarity make many parts of the story utterly baffling...
...beautiful undergraduate at a small Vermont college; Ballard is her instructor in a vague brand of philosophy. Beth fires double entendre after wildly provocative double entendre at the defenseless Ballard, her devoted tutor. The two rather quickly become lovers--but in the physical, not emotional, sense of the word. Delbanco incorrectly assumes a few lurid encounters between Ballard and Beth are sufficient demonstration of their timeless love. The tenuous emotional bond between the two lovers relies on little more than sex and arch conversations; it is scarcely strong enough to survive a strong shock...
When Ballard is severely injured in a hit-and-run accident quite early in the book, his romance with Beth is obviously doomed. Delbanco faithfully lists Ballard's injuries, yet writes absolutely nothing about his reaction to the accident or his recovery from the accident. One day Ballard is nearly dead, several pages later he seems quite well. Still later Delbanco dismisses 15 years of Ballard's life in two paragraphs and then mentions that Ballard has only now nearly finished working through the various stages of grief that follow a loss...
...downside to this shedding of specific values is concisely identified by Andrew Delbanco in his new book The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil: "Americans once believed in God and in Satan; they were known to be obsessed with sin, and they pictured their own history as an epic struggle with evil. Today, however, while the repertoire of evil seems never to have been richer, as we daily encounter (and even relish) images of unimaginable horror, our grasp on the reality of evil nonetheless seems week and uncertain, our responses to it flustered and sometimes...