Word: escapist
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There is much more to Kieu than escapist melodrama. Written by a renowned Vietnamese classicist named Nguyen Du (1766-1820), the poem in Vietnamese has a wide range of wordplay. The meter is a flowing iambic called luk-bat, full of rhyming and nearly as easy to memorize as a song. Much of this is unavoidably lost in the otherwise excellent English translation by Huynh Sanh Thong, a Vietnamese scholar who has lived in the U.S. all his adult life. Jaded Western readers who may find Kieu's plight unconvincing can still enjoy the poem for its language, especially...
...Reporter, even The Saturday Evening Post. None of them were very good but they at least provided some antidote to the relentless drone of television; they at least marked out a conception of the world less fleeting than a half hour of network news sandwiched between vapid and escapist situation comedies and cop shows. Now they are gone, and we are left with a choice among Walter Cronkite, Time magazine and the local newspaper with its wire service copy. We are fed an increasingly standardized and bland diet of news and comment, and the portions of hard-core information...
...that this is escapist claptrap. MacDonald offers something far more profound, the claptrap...
...catch-the-criminal so overwhelmingly the name of the game on TV? It makes for sheer escapist fantasy, of course. It also caters to the immemorial fascination with a puzzle, something which has enthralled and tantalized generations of mystery addicts. On a deeper level, however, TV's idealized cops, lawyers and shamuses may satisfy a yearning for a more ordered world-a world where pure good triumphs over pure evil, where justice is just, where the System works...
Instead, historical novels tend to entertain, distract, and pander to escapist tendencies. Certainly Vidal is a good enough writer to produce generally competent work, and when Vidal chooses to write an historical novel, he is likely to write a good one. But there is no reason to expect him to transcend the boundaries of the field...