Word: novel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...SPORT OF NATURE by Nadine Gordimer. In her ninth novel, the distinguished South African writer tells the visionary story of a wayward young white woman's efforts to help turn her homeland over to its long-suffering inhabitants...
Babbitt's own inheritance included an expensive and eclectic education and a strong sense of noblesse oblige. Where he grew up, the name Babbitt seldom reminded anyone of the bourgeois conformist of the Sinclair Lewis novel; rather, in Flagstaff, Ariz., it meant roughly what Rockefeller does in New York. Arriving a century ago in Flagstaff, a logging and ranching town south of the Grand Canyon, five Babbitt brothers turned a modest grubstake into a mercantile empire. As Bruce came of age, his family owned the grocery, drugstore and icehouse; a lumberyard and sawmill; and owned or controlled nearly a million...
...contrast continues to be obvious in He Got Hungry and Forgot His Manners, a novel that mugs New York while the city is still woozy from Wolfe's best-selling The Bonfire of the Vanities. Typically, Breslin is less concerned with the refinements of structure than with the shock effects of tabloid anecdote and an outraged moral tone. On the city's welfare system, for example: "The Poor are the most important people in New York, for their social welfare billions blow through the air for all the well-off to grab; where are the rich supposed to get their...
...from his mission in Africa to crusade in New York against sexual activity not sanctioned by Holy Mother Church. Father D'Arcy is accompanied by Great Big, a 7-ft. African with a craving for potato chips but not much to say. Great Big is, however, credited with the novel's title line ("I got hungry and forgot my manners"), which is Breslin's blunt way of making the historical point that people who do not have enough to eat are not concerned about which fork to use on the fish...
Cosgrove and his giant sidekick are farcical figures meant to illustrate the failures of both church and state when dealing with morality and poverty. The novel's principal setting is Howard Beach, a working-class section of the borough of Queens, described a bit too graphically by Breslin as a "white finger of land that sticks into Jamaica Bay by Kennedy Airport." Across a field of tall bulrushes is East New York, a Third World of crime, drugs and hunger...