Word: mandel
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Madness and war, the subjects of George Mandel's third novel, have been the most durable literary themes of the last two decades. This is probably not because the period has seen the spilling of more blood and sanity than others, but because it seems more than others to be the era of the average man, who obsesses authors with the similarities of his predicament rather than the individuality of his struggle. Many novelists nowadays tend to upend art to write about predicaments instead of people, but war novels and madhouse novels survive even this treatment. No matter...
Pushed from Behind. Mandel writes in this upended fashion. He tells of the mental disintegration of a U.S. mechanized cavalry troop fighting in Germany in 1944, and his soldiers are only a shade more than interchangeable war novel parts. But he describes the branching filaments of their decay with subtle force, and states clearly a proposition that most battle novels fudge: in the insane world of mud, blood and constant gunfire, the normal condition of a combat soldier must be something close to insanity...
...Mandel handles the deadly light with only a minimum of the writing-class prose that is standard in novels of this kind. The rich symbolism of the search for wax never becomes cant, even when the soldiers learn that the wax comes from melted saints. The Wax Boom is a commendable book, and, if predicament-describing were the main task of a novelist, it would be an excellent...
...allusions it will take him ten years to forget. But, pedantry aside, Bacchus and his father Silenus are two really engaging comic characters you won't forget: Bacchus (who is crowned with myrtle, but wears shades and is hip) is William Keough, who is almost as good as Allan Mandel, the drunken old God who gives imitations of Mars trapped in the net at parties, and who chases sea nymphs. At the play's end, Midas--a tragically wiser king--is standing dolefully orating about life and aspirations; and back of him, the two cavorting Gods dance their way offstage...
Advise and Consent (adapted from Allen Drury's novel by Loring Mandel) makes good theater, not for dramatizing anything in political life that seems explosively immediate or real, but by often making vivid use of politics as people, of politics as warfare, of politics as dirt or pay dirt. In its stage adaptation, Allen Drury's bestselling tale of the senatorial fight over a President's nominee for Secretary of State abounds in sharp dilemmas over shadowy issues and in moral positions lacking defined points of view. In terms of political substance, Advise and Consent is vague...