Word: fictionalizes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Calm v. Passion. Arthur Winner marries again. Clarissa is tall, athletic and thirtyish, an avid latecomer to the art of love. The hour of that art which the couple share in Cozzens' pages has not been paralleled for clinical candor in U.S. fiction since Edmund Wilson singed the censors with Memoirs of Hecate County. Yet Lawyer Winner has a more demanding love-the law. The law is his passion precisely because it rules out passion. He is comforted by its seductive repose, "that majestic calm of reason designed to curb all passions or enthusiasms of emotion...
...Cozzens' eyes, the great villain-"the underlying principle that has ruined American fiction"-is sentimentality...
Idyl's End. Author Cronin scarcely lives up to Herodotus or Hakluyt, for nowadays history is considered more "creative" if it is presented as fiction. Cronin has recast historic events in a form which the Persians call dastan, i.e., "near-factual history, almost myth." But the hero of this dastan will be remembered: Ghazan Khan, nomad chief of a tribe that Cronin calls the Falqani and a man hopelessly caught in the paradoxes of progress...
...whale in a swimming pool. But Drohan, who has worked in the U.S. civil service off and on since 1942, gets tangled in his unreeling novel and goes down with his quips. Spoofing government may be like spoofing Hollywood-reality is so much more preposterous than any possible fiction. What might have been a sharp-witted satire on boobery among bureaucrats turns out to be a sheepish sermon on sic transit gloria Monday through Friday...
Most Southern authors have a marked tendency to breathe harder than other writers, especially when they tackle historical fiction. Out of the huffing and puffing come purple imagery, melodrama of incest and murder, sentence structure as involuted as an express highway cloverleaf. The dividend from this school of writing is that the reader achieves a total immersion in the scene; the danger is that he may drown in words. Fortunately, Author Lytle (of Murfreesboro, Tenn.) comes up for air every now and then, and gets on with his story of life in the Cumberlands of Tennessee during the 1870s...