Word: melodramas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...renowned (not only as a center of culture, but as the focus of controversy). The Plough and the Stars was chosen for the Abbey's bicentennial tour in New York and Boston because it was definitive in developing the "Abbey style" of Irish realism: perfect brogues, meticulous blocking, sublime melodrama...
...trouble is that no incident achieves its full measure of comedy or melodrama, just as none of the characters hanging about the car wash are given sharp definition. A film that might have been an interesting curiosity, some thing quite novel on today's movie scene, turns out to be much less engaging in execution than it is as an idea. Car Wash does suggest, though, that there are unsuspected film possibilities in observing closely the daily lives of ordinary black people. Despite the movie's devitalizing casualness, it is a relief to see urban blacks neither...
Seaver's introduction sketches Beckett's biography as clearly and completely, if melodramatically, as any around. The melodrama consists in Seaver's role as one of Beckett's first advocates in the publishing world, where Beckett was accustomed to little success in the early 50s. Seaver's struggling literary magazine, Merlin, encumbered itself (in the market) by publishing sections of Beckett's anti-novel, Watt. Recounting the trials and small victories of this and subsequent publishing ventures, Seaver recalls his impressions of this awesomely enigmatic man. After refusing to reply to Seaver's entreaties for a manuscript, Beckett first appears...