Word: nathaneal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...when Nathan Garland first constructed the official logo. Ryan sent the New Haven graphic designer back to the drawing board for fine tuning several times. He wanted Garland to measure the total square area alloted to both the block H and block...
...keeps him and Brack from salvaging the play is the same lack of ambition that hampers the other actors. This time, though, the lack comes in the production staff itself. High-schoolish, thrown-together props repeatedly puncture the illusion, starting with the opening complaint of a maiden aunt (Barbara Nathan). "There's no more space here for these flowers," she laments, looking around at the polished, unoccupied tabletops of the Quincy JCR. "So many people have sent flowers already." In later scenes Hedda's envious comments about Mrs. Elvsted's long hair ring oddly when directed at Gray, whose hair...
There is also the matter of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's fictional alter id and hero of a comic trilogy that has forever flattened the myth of the glamorous writing life. Zuckerman, of course, is not Roth but rather the fullest and most personal expression of a theme that has come to dominate his work: the mayhem unleashed by those who would escape their pasts. This may be what David Kepesh in Roth's The Professor of Desire had in mind when he spoke stiltedly of "the destructive power-of those who see a way out of the shell...
Ambitious boy kicks burg is a familiar story, and central to the Zuckerman books. The Ghost Hunter (1979) introduced a young Nathan, like Roth a Newark-born writer who was hailed as the most promising voice in American letters. Zuckerman Unbound (1981) found the hero in his 30s, beleaguered by celebrity and controversy. Carnovsky, a Portnoy-like novel, had angered the community and his own family. His father's dying word to his son was "Bastard." Roth's father, a retired insurance executive, is a vigorous supporter of his son's work...
Roth has never had an easy time behind his typewriter. He is a demanding craftsman who has chosen difficult material. "Intimacy and subjectivity are my subjects," he explains, though that is as far as he goes toward defining the boundary between himself and Nathan Zuckerman. Their Newarks are the same; both lived in the Weequahic section, which Roth describes as once having been a Jewish village of hard-working plumbers, salesmen and shopkeepers...