Word: dickensians
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...bustling business district and into the slums with one seamless narrative. Current trends and ideas are summarized with pithy aphorisms: Exercise-crazed women become "Boys with Breasts" and get-rich-quick schemes induce "The Aha! Phenomenon." Wolfe entertains readers with his keen ear for dialect and penchant for Dickensian names like Armholster, Peepgass and Armentrout. And of course, when it comes to clothes, who but a dandy like Wolfe would note the difference between a twist-weave suit and a hard-finished worsted...
...tale was suggested by John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, is convinced that a heroic destiny awaits him. How he attains that improbable yet inspirational end, through a chain of mix-ups, mishaps and coincidences of the kind only a perversely playful God (or a writer of Dickensian boldness) could ordain, makes Simon Birch a curiously entrancing, quite unexpected treat...
REVEALED. The identity of HELEN CATHCART, elusive royal biographer; following the death of her loyal assistant HAROLD ALBERT; in Midhurst, England. Cathcart, it turns out, was really Albert--clothed in literary drag to woo his predominantly female readership. Albert educated himself by reading, escaping a Dickensian childhood--absent father, reviled stepfather--to write Her Majesty, Prince Charles and other genteel accounts of royal life...
...upper-middle class and those who would join it. Nuts in May (1975) is a drolly unfair comedy about two educated twits on a camping holiday, seeking to be at one with nature and above base humanity. Who's Who (1978) turns a stockbroker into a toady of Dickensian breadth...
...novels have been called Dickensian, largely on the basis of the first one, which is jammed with plot and characters and ends with the cliff-hanger of Annelies' legal kidnapping. But as the series continues, Minke's adventures--he becomes a journalist and publishes a successful newspaper in opposition to the Dutch rule--serve almost entirely as the framework for an endless series of questing dialogues. Sourly or hopefully, with colleagues or adversaries, Minke explores the nature of colonialism and capitalism, the psychology of police power, the role of women, the techniques of political organization, the efficacy of boycotts...