Word: novel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Widely acclaimed by critics as being perhaps the best novel yet about World War II, was: 1. Night and the City...
Ellin Berlin, an R.C. who married a Russian Jewish songwriter named Irving Berlin and made a go of it, knows that those who marry out of their faith are not always so lucky. In Lace Curtain, her second novel, Veronica goes through a young girl's social hell before she finally marries Protestant Jamie Stair. Then she discovers that not even love and children are sufficient armor against relatives and religious differences. At the end, Veronica waits for her husband to return from the war, prays that somehow they can make their marriage last...
There is little novel interpretation of character: even that might distract from the great language, or distort it. There is no clear placement in time, no outside world except blind sky, faint landscapes, ruminant surf, a lyrical brook. The camera, prowling and peering about the cavernous castle, creates a kind of continuum of time and space. Such castles were almost as naked of furniture as the Elizabethan stage; Olivier uses both facts to the film's advantage. Not even the costumes are distracting; they are close to the simplest mind's-eye image: a King & Queen like playing...
When Henry Miller's first novel, Tropic of Cancer, came out in Paris in 1931, it was greeted with shocked silence, snickers, or the sound of licking lips. Its admirers took its weedy profusion of four-letter words for daring wit and convention-defying "art." Miller became the hero of Bohemian barflies and Greenwich Villagers everywhere...
This situation is promising, but it never quite pays off. For one thing, about halfway through the novel the reader gets an uneasy suspicion that Miss Sharp is trying to smuggle in a little Heavy Thought with the froth. What's worse, neither the comic nor dramatic possibilities of the clash between Tilly and Simon are fully exploited. In the end, the novel has no more sparkle than decarbonated soda water. But even flat soda can quench a summer day's thirst...