Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Agnew is back, at least temporarily, as the author of a novel. The Canfield Decision, the former Vice President's first work of fiction, leads one to believe that Agnew's career as a writer will be about as successful as his career as a politician. There is no question that the book would have remained unpublished if anyone else had written it. The editors at Playboy Press (if there are editors at Playboy Press, and not just photo-retouchers) appear to have adopted a laissez-faire attitude toward the manuscript, which at 344 tedious pages is too long...
Irving Wallace, or Arthur Hailey, or any of the other neo-realists in the supermarket-check-out-counter-school of modern American fiction might have been able to go somewhere with this plot, but Agnew simply does not know where to start. Nothing happens for the first two hundred pages. Agnew introduces his characters with an almost Proustian verve for description, but his idea of expressing meaningful detail is to inform the reader every time a character shaves, or brushes his teeth. Then, when the action finally takes place--most of it in the final fifty pages--Agnew makes...
...books was like Clay T. Whitehead's The FBI Story, a glowing document that the FBI still uses for public relations. The other narratives were written in the paranoid, Mark-Lane style of journalism. These works painted the FBI as a demon bureaucracy and usually smacked more of fiction than reportage...
...Fiction a bad name (I at least thank heaven...
...visions and ambitions, the collective dream of Jewish fulfillment and the personal wish to improve the lot of their sons and daughters could be satisfied at the same time." In the ambitious second half of the book, Howe analyzes Yiddishkeit as the culture of the postponed decision. The "modernized" fiction of Yiddish culture grappled with universal themes of class struggle, personal relations and urban anomie as well as with the Jewish experience in eastern Europe. Uneasy Yiddish theater, trapped between the artistic aspirations of its playwrights and the communal experiences clamoured for by its audiences, emerged as brilliant, outrageous theatricality...