Word: levins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...prodigious leapers!") collide with the grim fantasies spawned by anxiety ("Perhaps there will be an earthquake and we won't have to take exams"). One sits at a chair and looks out the window. Cambridge does not even have the grace to be covered with snow ("What if Harry Levin actually wrote the plays of Shakespeare?"). Sulphur-laden ice spreads like cancer over the Charles and Roast Beet Specials cost 60. ("If the Atlantic rose a few inches. Boston would be devastated and there wouldn't be any exams...
...itself through sleep-drugged minds ("Gazelles cannot actually leap; they are merely very poor flyers"), until fact and fancy no longer collide but merge like an icy cancer spreading over a Roast Beef Special ("If the Atlantic rose and drowned all the gazettes there might not be any Harry Levin...
...court will be made up of six students--four undergraduate and two graduate--chosen by Judicial Administrator Gail Levin from a pre-selected pool...
Perhaps the greatest triumph of all occurs at the end of the novel when Susan stops immersing herself in self-pity and recognizes that her problems are no lesser or greater than the rest of the world's. Ironically, Levin seems to succeed most when she quits writing for effect and allows the characters to speak for themselves...
Simple Truths suffers from all the predictable flaws of a first novel. The story is fragmented, the insights are a bit cliched, and the real plot--the relationship between Susan and Leonid--remains hidden. Yet the story does show potential. Sheila Levin would fare better in her next novel if she ceased indulging her characters in self-righteousness and let the reader discover the novel's simple truths for himself...