Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Warren, 70, whose career has included Pulitzer Prizes for both poetry and fiction, does not shirk controversy in these two sinuously reasoned essays. He contends that art and democracy feed on each other, because both depend on the play of unfettered minds. At first glance, this seems preposterous; Western art has flourished under monarchies, tyrannies and varied refractions of the Imperial style. But Warren argues that the Greek dramatists and Roman poets created the very concept of free, responsible men that "in an imperfect, stumbling, and ragged way was to become more and more widely available." In the fullness...
...fiction of Samuel Beckett, a clearly evolving narrative line has been sacrificed in favor of a radically fragmented, almost pulverized texture. Directional melodies and harmonies have been replaced by sudden bursts of sound, explosions of something not quite rational or explicable...
...Doctocow's Ragtime is historical fiction, like Johnny Tremain. And while I realize that in some circles this is nothing short of blasphemy, I think it's as good a book--the same wide-eyed, burrowed-under-the-covers-with-secret-flashlight fascination, the same wonderfulness. Doctorow's way of letting you slip into the sheets of history has been compared to the work of Robert Altman, who is planning to film Ragtime, and with the magical trickle of ragtime music. These are good analogies, but a passage from the novel might give a better idea. Father is a Harvard...
...billion times a second in a rich, dank forest--you can hear the process. There's something in the language that achieves this: short sentences appearing and vanishing like postcards and daguerrotypes. Doctorow doesn't invest his people with modern concerns like Gore Vidal does, in his historical fiction, adding sex and neurosis and perversity of motive. The grainy literariness of the ragtime people is inviolable--ladies constantly fleeing to the garden, derbies dotting riverside parks on a Sunday...
...FICTION 1 -The Moneychangers, Hailey