Word: flaubert
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Evans studied literature at Andover, Williams (for a brief year), and finally as auditor at the Sorbonne. Some of his heroes were Flaubert. Baudelaire, and James Joyce, and he would have been a writer perhaps if he had not found their precedent paralyzing. His brief attempt at painting was definitively, according to friends, a failure...
...their spurts and blooms of color, are populated by pale androgynous youths and languid women encased, like scarab beetles, in glittering carapaces of emerald and embroidery. Such pictures were hailed as setting the tone of an entire sensibility-the same cast of imagination that in literature ran from Flaubert's Salammbô to Swinburne and Wilde, heavy with allusions to enigmatic and castrating Fatal Women. Moreau's own work was rich in homosexual overtones, though in fact he kept up a continuous liaison with a woman named Adelaide-Alexandrine Dureux for 25 years...
...character's situation. The reader will find himself wavering between conflicting assessments: the story is really a disturbing piece of surrealism or it is a neat con job. The compromise view-that the book is a bit of both-leaves Ward Just (author of The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert, an excellent collection of several stories published last year) as one of several promising American writers now creeping up on the big novel...
...Roth tries to get from life to fiction depends on formal tricks, in an effort to refine and accentuate the pure material. It is symptomatic that Roth should have his hero, through the account of his unhappy marriage and a couple of affairs, keep quoting from Flaubert, the original great modern impersonalist. Because Tarnopol can no longer just live his personal life. He has not just read too many novels, like Madame Bovary; he has read too many novels like Madame Bovary. He is condemned to work out the hassles of his marriage in a long, unfinished and unfinishable novel...
...novel where Tarnopol has tried to order the disorder of his marriage lies, in reams of rejected drafts and re-drafts, in several cardboard cartons. On them the writer has pasted a quotation from Flaubert, speaking of how art can become "an outlet for passion, a kind of chamberpot to catch an overflow. It smells bad; it smells of hate." So, however, does Roth's book, despite all the cool distance of formal self-consciousness: it is impossible to read a book which treats a writer's life with such sordid particularity and not find oneself automatically extending the sordidness...