Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Robert Neumann is one of those novelists who wish to leave the reader's complacency in tatters. At his best, he is brilliantly artful at it. His By the Waters of Babylon (TIME, July i, 1940) remains a classic work of fiction on the lives of European Jews. Children of Vienna, a much slighter story, is addressed, says Vienna-born Author Neumann, "to the men and women of the victorious countries"-especially to any who have failed to imagine life in the rubble "east of the Meridian of Despair...
...Kuomintang is portrayed by the authors as his retreat from dynamism into the morass of warlord-infested intrigue government. Mr. White and Miss Jacoby are not alone in diagnosing complete cynicism and corruption as the secondary invaders of the diseased Kuomintang body politic. This accusation is not fiction, but page after page of documented fact that will force thinking Americans to search about for an alternative to an ally-government that is bringing China to misery...
...story is as breathlessly helter-skelter as most Chandler yarns. Unlike most, it strews only a modest number of red herrings and thus makes reasonable sense at the fadeout. Detective Montgomery is hired by a glamorous crime-fiction editor (Audrey Totter) to track down the missing wife of her publisher-boss (Leon Ames). The lady of the title never appears in the film because she is dead at the bottom of a lake. Before Montgomery finally catches up with the killer-and with love-he has bulled his way through brass knuckles, a moldy jail, various sinister strangers, venal policemen...
...more than worthy of the writer whom Tarkington regarded as his master, William Dean Howells-almost worthy of Henry James. But why was this novel as a whole inferior to Howells, James or Edith Wharton, and why has Tarkington never been thought a strong figure among U.S. writers of fiction? The simplest answer is that for all his abilities he was incurably sentimental...
This Is Your FBI (Fri. 8:30 p.m., ABC) is out to show that truth can be as blood-&-thunderous as fiction...