Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...trunk that contains stage props and costumes from the golden years of the Harlem Renaissance are relieved of their burden by a few admiring bystanders. Naturally, they begin wondering what those days (or, more properly, nights) must have been like, and in a transformation familiar to any science fiction devotee, they're whisked back to a '20s downtown speakeasy. The ensuing plot developments seem to exist either to show off more clubs like the Cotton Club, the Savoy Ballroom, and Small's Paradise, or to introduce more golden oldies...
...News. During Mary's muse-ship Hemingway wrote four books of fiction. One good: The Old Man and the Sea. One soso: Islands in the Stream. One pretty awful: Across the River and Into the Trees. (Mary recognized this as a disaster at the time, she reports. But Muses aren't hired to bring the bad news, and she didn't.) The last book, yet to be published, is The Garden of Eden, a story of a writer and his "triangular domestic arrangements," set mostly on the Riviera in the 1920s, which Mary describes cautiously as "containing...
Roots most closely resembles a historical novel, a form that Haley does not seem to have studied too carefully. His narrative is a blend of dramatic and melodramatic fiction and fact that wells from a profound need to nourish himself with a comprehensible past. Haley recreates the Old South of mansions and slave shacks, fully aware that chains and blood ties were at times indistinguishable. The book dramatically details slave family life-birth, courtship, marriage ("jumping the broom"), death and the ever present fear of being sold off and having to leave your...
NEITHER CELINE'S fiction, nor his political rhetoric is informed by logic. They are both swept along by passion and instinct, by a kind of blindly nihilistic faith. McCarthy suggests that his antisemitism is coupled with an affinity for the Jew and explains this ambivalence in pseudo-religious terms...
Such semantic fastidiousness is more common in philosophy than in fiction, and Adler's stories are more successful as illustrated lectures than as riveting narrative. It should be added that Adler is almost always a riveting lecturer. Like the legendary basilisk, she can look at a subject and turn it to stone. Speedboat is a cascade of smooth and shiny pebbles...