Word: detailing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
HAVING documented life in Newark and New York, in the process establishing himself as a superb social satirist (though, admittedly, the satire of late has been diluted by too much detail and conversation), Roth has now written his first exclusively introspective novel. Having reached the age of 25, he begins to muck about in the depths where he was once content to capture the ironies on the surface. To some extent, the process began in the character of Letting Go's Paul Herz, but where Roth's study of Herz was pedestrian, weighted with many of the conventions of novelistic...
...cadres had earlier spread word that 21 government troopers would die -one for each of the guerrillas slain in the January encounters. Brigadier General Vicente Raval, who commands the Constabulary, put his forces on alert. But within hours, a band of about 20 Huks ambushed a twelve-man government detail, killing two and wounding nine. Three days later, another group shot up an army Jeep. A lieutenant and two other soldiers died in the fusillade; the lieutenant's four-year-old son was wounded, and only one passenger escaped unharmed...
Nowhere perhaps is this more vividly seen than in his 1896 version of The Sick Child (see color pages), a marvelously sensitive evocation of his elder sister Sophie, who died of tuberculosis when Munch was 14. In fact, the lithograph of The Sick Child is essentially a detail from a larger oil that Munch had painted some ten years before. The painting showed the child upright against a pillow, with her aunt, head bowed, next to her, but the lithograph zeroes in on "the trembling lips, the transparent skin, the tired eyes" that had inspired him in the first place...
...most explicit detail ever bound between the covers of a bestseller, Portnoy relives his adolescent masturbations. Boy Scouts, for example, will find the novel considerably more informative on the subject than their official handbook. He describes how he used his sister's unlaundered brassiere, his windbreaker on a bus, and even his baseball glove while sitting in the balcony of a burlesque house. But the more he discharged, the greater became his guilt. It was a vicious cycle that led him into his psychological ghetto of lust and shame...
...using the psychoanalytic monologue as a literary device, Roth has achieved an individuality of tone and gesture and a retrieval of detail that transform his characters into super-stereotypes, well suited for this age of exaggeration. Sophie and Jack Portnoy are pop Jewish parents; the Monkey is the apotheosis of the contemporary Id Girl; and Portnoy embodies not only the tics of a man trying to disentangle himself from his background, but also the latent fear of the liberal humanist that he may find himself out. It is no small concern to the Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity, champion...