Word: novel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...face of it, this is a hospital novel that makes the most of medical melodrama. But it is as far removed from the usual scalpel-and-suture bestseller as a book on home remedies is from Gray's Anatomy, and it won the choicest collection of British reviews achieved by any book in 1958. Said the Times Literary Supplement: "The book exercises a complete fascination." Said the Irish Times: "Quite possibly a masterpiece." Despite the sometimes awesome gulf that separates British and U.S. tastes, U.S. readers are likely to find themselves agreeing with these judgments of The Rack...
...French Alps, where sanatoria dot the landscape like shacks in a gold-rush town, come tuberculosis patients from all over the world. How many fail to return is suggested by the popular nickname of the place: "the cemetery of Europe." In this macabre mountain spot appears the novel's hero: Paul Davenant, a British World War II veteran, lately a Cambridge student, now sick and broke. He is a charity case who, with many others, is supported by an international student association at a sanatorium called Les Alpes. Davenant hopes, as do all the patients, that Les Alpes...
...nurses blunder, the food drives patients to mutiny; in the background lurks the cut-price competition among sanatoria entrepreneurs, who often measure their profit margins by the pennies they save in the kitchen. Seen as an expose of the tuberculosis racket, The Rack would be notable as a muckraking novel alone...
...resulting thesis novel is Author...
...because of the nude painted on its nose. Buzz looks like a burly motorcycle cop, rakes over his crew in billingsgate, yips earsplitting war whoops as the bombs drop away, and slavers over off-duty hobbies that would make good latrine-wall copy. Why diffident Copilot Charles Boman, the novel's first-person narrator, hero-worships Buzz is a mystery, but it is presumably because Marrow oozes self-confidence and is a genius at the flight controls. Poor Bo is colorless, decent, sensitive about being short, and his virtue consists of the absence of vice...