Word: novelistically
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...issues for the working poor -- have become important for the majority of American women. Only today does the women's movement seem remiss in having failed to give greater emphasis to these matters. "The things I fought for are now considered quaint," complains Erica Jong, a best-selling feminist novelist. "We've won the right to be exhausted, to work a 30-hour day. Younger women say, 'Who wants that?' They say, 'We don't need feminism anymore.' They don't understand graduating magna cum laude from Harvard and then being told to go to the typing pool...
...Wolfe's manifesto is crammed with an account of his rationale for writing Bonfire. He says he wanted to create a novel about New York City in the manner of Zola's and Balzac's novels about Paris or Thackeray's Vanity Fair. He kept waiting for some novelist to encompass the great phenomena of the age -- the hippie movement, say, or racial clashes or the Wall Street boom. But no one came forward. "It had been only yesterday, in the 1930s, that the big realistic novel, with its broad social sweep, had put American literature on the world stage...
...Wolfe's jeremiad, the "puppet-masters" of the American literary scene imported a new pantheon of foreign literary gods -- Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The "headlong rush" to get rid of realism, Wolfe complains, resulted in statements like that of experimental novelist John Hawkes, "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme...
...there are also some strong dissenters. Novelist John Updike, for example, despite receiving favorable mention from Wolfe, is not amused by the manifesto. "It's the sort of thing ((Wolfe)) says," he complains. "It seems sort of self-serving and superficially felt. It seems to me that isms, including Magical Realism and Minimalism, are all honorable alternatives to being realistic." Updike is echoed by fellow novelist John Barth, whom Wolfe calls "the peerless leader" of the retreat from realism for his "neo- fabulist" style. Barth says Wolfe's manifesto "is much too narrow a view. I see the feast...
...kind of man many Japanese admire -- handsome and well tailored, an avid yachtsman and tennis player, successful politician and novelist. But what makes Shintaro Ishihara, 57, one of the most popular figures in Japan these days is his unapologetic view of the country's pre-eminence on the world stage. As a corollary, he warns the U.S. that its days as a leading economic and industrial power are numbered and that it ignores Japanese interests and sensibilities at its peril...