Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...work has not been seen whole. Now it can be: last week a retrospective of 201 paintings, drawings, multiples and prints by Jasper Johns opened at New York's Whitney Museum. Curator David Whitney, a former assistant to Johns, put the retrospective together; the West Coast science-fiction writer Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain) supplied a catalogue text. It is, of course, a fascinating show; but the painter who rises from it is not the Leonardesque genius we have all been conditioned to expect...
...fact, Herman Melville was so wounded by critics that he wrote no fiction at all for 30 years. Says Psychoanalyst Yale Kramer, who is studying Melville's life: "He behaved like a child stubbornly remaining silent in a passive attempt at revenge." But even good reviews can bring on writer's block; they tend to paralyze by awakening great expectations. As Author Cyril Connolly, a part-time blockee, expressed it: "Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising...
...with the characters' politics. The coffin-nappers here are not simply crooks looking for a big haul, but political protesters, holding one national symbol for the ransom of another--but very different--symbol. The trouble is that just as the book is too serious to be taken as light fiction, it is too outrageous to be taken seriously by anyone...
...call Godey's latest book simply a work of fiction would be misleading. Although none of the major characters really exists, there are striking similarities between most of them and actual political figures. For example, Francis Rowan, the priest whose freedom Ken Booth seeks by stealing the Unknown Soldier, seems clearly patterned after religious activists of the '60s such as Daniel Berrigan and James Groppi--and in fact, Berrigan is compared to Rowan by name...
Such similarities between events in the book and in the real world might, possibly, be coincidental. But in several references, such as when one character is mentioned as having known a woman killed in the 1970 explosion of a "bomb factory" in Greenwich Village, the difference between fact and fiction is negligible...