Word: epigraphic
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...never really be defined or predicted, like an enfant terrible who out of whim kicks down any castle of philosophical building blocks that the inquirer might care to construct around him. Which is a perfectly valid point, though it hardly requires a book, as the five lines of the epigraph demonstrate...
...book's epigraph is from Scott Joplin: "Do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play ragtime fast..." And it seems like Doctorow's player piano has some brake on it, because Ragtime seems much longer than it is. It goes fast, but the prose is economical and touches such a torch to the imagination that when you go back to look for a ten-page scene it turns out to be a paragraph...
...deracinated hero of his second greatest work, Steps. Like these central characters, Kosinski once fled the hell of war and totalitarianism; like them, he suffered unnamed-and perhaps unnameable-trauma. Cockpit seems to be a refraction of those anguished early years. If it is, then the novel's epigraph need not be from Dostoyevsky but from Auden, whose insight remains the subtext for all acts of vengeance: land the public know What all schoolchildren learn Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return...
Adams begins his tale with an epigraph from Jung: "Superstition and accident manifest the will of God." Perhaps, but not here. The author spins out his romance entertainingly, but without dealing seriously with the questions he raises: of belief and its perversion, of authority and its corruption. Good as he is at nature walks, Adams does not venture far into the forests of the mind...
...aesthetic win. Embracing contradictions, De Kooning refuses to be typecast. "I think," he declared in 1949, "it is the most bourgeois idea to think one can make a style beforehand. To desire to make a style is to apologize for one's own anxiety." It is a suitable epigraph for his whole career...