Word: hartness
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Author Josephine Hart would like to provide a piece of literature worthy of Widener. But Damage, her novel of sex and death, remains little more than a fluffy book suitable only for beach reading. Ultimately Hart provides neither the intellectual interest of a Faulkner novel nor the enjoyable anti-intellectual style of Danielle Steele's works...
...these characters act with such reckless abandon is only vaguely explained by Hart. Anna's childhood was marred by the suicide of a brother who could not live knowing that she would see other men. She tries to deal with her grief by having affairs with various men, among them Martyn and his father...
...Hart's stilted prose style, in its attempt to create a sensual yet literary story, kills all the emotion that this potentially erotic plot could have elicited. Hart tries frantically to use as many adjectives as possible and ends up with amateurish Dickensian overkill--the story and characters are utterly unbelievable...
Damage has a plot worthy of the best Harlequin romances, but Hart diminishes its effectiveness on this base level by striving to create prose that is so stylized it appears amusing. Her writing is so laden with excessive verbiage that, in the end, the author's style, rather than plot or characterization, dominates the book. In another author, that dominance might not spell disaster, but the only response that Hart's prose provokes is laughter...
...scholar, I think his greatest contribution was his book which he co-authored with Henry Hart, The Legal Process," Vorenberg said. "That has had more influence on the way law is taught than any other single work...