Word: novel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Counterfeiters, is well-known in the U.S. -and mainly by esthetes and highbrows. It is a brilliant, difficult novel of good & evil, with plots and counterplots twisting through a choking fog of perversion. Gide himself intended The Counterfeiters to be his major work. Even so, only 45,000 copies of all its U.S. editions have been sold. Of the other 16 Gide books published in the U.S., only Vol. I of his intimate Journals (TIME, Sept. 22) has made any dent (10,000 copies sold) on U.S. bookreaders...
...study human lives during a period when not merely was an old order overthrown but several more were manufactured and destroyed. If she could have created the outer atmospheres and inner climates through which her characters are supposed to have lived, The Nazarovs would be a novel of great tragic force. But the job calls for more than the style of a competent linguist and the memory of a good reporter. What will impress the reader is not so much the novel that is there as the suggestion of the novel that might have been...
This plodding historical novel may possibly go like wildfire in the lending libraries, or even in Hollywood. The married life of long-suffering Alis and oafish Ansiau is described in great, sometimes tedious detail. Miss Oldenbourg's canvas is wide but her stitches are painstakingly small. Heroine Alis settles down to yearly pregnancies, frequent miscarriages, and incessant worries about the financial decline of the manor, the fruits of which her self-indulgent husband squanders on pomp, tournaments and the Crusades. Before old age, each has one fierce extramarital fling -and two bastards are added to the brood of infants...
...details of a rough and cruel period of history, The World Is Not Enough is impressive. Miss Oldenbourg seems to know a lot about the Middle Ages. As a novel, the book wobbles from sheer weight of overpopulated subplots. The author meanders along on the theory that an unselective detailing of life histories is a satisfactory substitute for dramatic construction...
Amory occupied the presidency of the CRIMSON in 1939 and now contributes to national magazines, while his novel, "The Proper Bostonians," steadily holds a top spot on the best-seller list...