Word: melodrama
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Outrage rises from the men - and from the prose - and it continually buoys Voyage. Hayden is offended that things as splendid as ships, and the sea they sail on, are polluted by avarice. Yet for a moralist with a case to make, he stays commendably free of melodrama and polemic. It is clear that his seamen need to unite, but the organizers in the book are ineffective, and there is no vacuous optimism; a seafarers' union cannot (and did not) miraculously end greed or brutality...
...many New Yorkers, that tale would have seemed only slightly more bizarre than the melodrama unfolding on their front pages and television screens last week. Rupert Murdoch ?the furry-browed, softspoken, intensely competitive Australian owner of ten major newspapers, 13 magazines and dozens of lesser publications?had no sooner established himself as the owner of the city's only afternoon paper, the Post (circ. 500,000), than he was making a surprise bid to buy control of the New York Magazine Co. New York Founding Editor Clay Felker, meanwhile, canvassed millionaires around the world for help in fighting...
Welles comes off as a man seeped in, and limited to, a theatrical attitude towards Art. (He never tires of adoring his cohorts.) O'Hara and Quinlan seems to work for him only because they make for good melodrama. When you think about this insight as a guide to his career, it makes sense...
More than any of his contemporaries, John Gardner has made being a novelist a hyphenated art. In The Sunlight Dialogues he did a brilliant turn as philosopher-novelist, debating issues of law and dissent while nimbly stage-managing a family melodrama in upstate New York. In his re-creations of myth, Grendel and Jason and Medeia, he played the novelist-as-epic-poet, perhaps a little consciously; but once again he revealed his consistent longing for Significance, for the Big Theme, for some dimension that extends beyond the modern novel into older, more classical forms...
...curious exchange, The Smugglers becomes almost a theological dialogue while October Light is steeped in melodrama. A trap set for Sally by James nearly kills her peacemaking niece. James almost kills himself in his pickup truck while returning from Merton's Hideaway, full of rage and beer. Retrospective suicides begin falling out of the family tree: James' mad Uncle Ira, James' tormented son Richard...