Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Quinn's Book may at first prompt some head scratching, since it looks like a startling departure from the fiction that established Kennedy's reputation. As in his first four novels, the setting is Albany, but not the Prohibition dives and Depression-haunted back streets populated by the likes of Legs Diamond and drifting members of the Phelan family. This time out the year is 1849 and the narrative mode has changed from naturalistic to headlong melodramatic. In short order, an exotic singer and dancer named Magdalena Colon drowns while being ferried across the ice-clogged Hudson River en route...
Such an image of Gauguin, as Stuckey and Brettell show by exhaustive research, is mostly moonshine. The brute of fiction was not only a superbly intelligent painter but also a writer who left, as Brettell points out, the "largest and most important body of texts, illustrated and otherwise, produced by any great artist in France since . . . Delacroix . . . That he has always been treated as a businessman-turned-artist rather than an artist- turned-writer shows the extent to which his literary achievement has been undervalued...
...hardly obsolete. All of Singer's short fiction, from long-established classics like Gimpel the Fool to the latest story, hot off the presses, is amazingly of a piece. Three basic formulas are constantly repeated. Unrest stirs a rural Polish village, thanks to the mischief of its inhabitants and their attendant demons. An aspiring young author passes his time in Warsaw visiting the Yiddish Writers' Club and storing up everything he hears and does. An older incarnation of the same man, expatriated from Poland and living on Manhattan's Upper West Side, submits willingly to readers and strangers who come...
...author aims most effectively for the mind's ear; his fiction is filled with exuberant noise, the din of voices demanding attention, explaining themselves, complaining about the way the world has treated them. "Man has no more freedom than a bedbug," insists one. "In this respect, Spinoza was right." Another tells how jealousy drove him crazy: "I now hated all women. Lifting my hands to heaven, I swore never to marry." The narrator asks, "Did you keep your word?" The laconic response: "I have six grandchildren." Singer's people seldom shy away from expounding on the mysteries of existence: "People...
...assignment with gusto, typing in the jeep, pausing to shake the sand out of her typewriter. No wonder a weary colleague asks her to quit showing off. But soon she meets the love of her life, a tank commander named Tom Southern. The savvy reader of war fiction knows at once that earnest Tom will be dead within 50 pages, but Claudia is launched on a splendidly grand passion. And when finally the disastrous word comes from the front, she shows her saving grace: guts...