Word: novelistically
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This decidedly common touch is in keeping with Director Brian Murray's sour vision. At the center of Blithe Spirit is a love triangle: smug, conventional Ruth Condomine (Ivey) is in love with her novelist husband Charles (Chamberlain); so is hoydenish Elvira (Danner), his late wife, whom Madame Arcati accidentally materializes; and all three of the Condomines are passionately in love with themselves. Most productions of Coward tend to be as glittery and brittle as spun glass. Murray brings the proceedings down to earth: these are not natural aristocrats but peasants with money and a veneer of polish, and when...
Left to herself, Adele is rewarded with the life she always wanted -- based solely on appearance. She goes "from one perfect outfit to the next . . . Someone could always be watching." This obsession with surfaces is contagious: First Novelist Simpson also suffers from it. She uses brand names and meticulous descriptions of the ordinary to build an appearance of reality, but beneath the book's carefully crafted details there is not quite enough of the breath or pulse of life...
...Wolfe met Ella Winter, a political activist and the widow of Lincoln Steffens. As Wolfe spoke of his hometown, Winter asked, "Don't you know you can't go home again?" Her question struck a chord in Wolfe's dilemma. Wolfe had hoped to be the Great American Novelist, "reminding his readers of the promise of American life, of the greatness that could still lie ahead for a nation begun with an ideal of a free man's life,...fulfilling its whole purpose in an atmosphere of free and spacious enlightenment." The promise felt, the goal defined, Wolfe nonetheless...
...Cezanne, Matisse and Gaugin, Fry and Bell preferred any imitation of the Ecole de Paris, however pallid, to anything else, however strong. They both disliked vorticism, the remarkable English movement that combined elements of cubism, futurism and Dada and centered on the belligerent genius of Wyndham Lewis, painter, soldier, novelist, critic and editor of Blast. Bell in 1917 sneered at the "new spirit in the little backwater, called English vorticism, which already gives signs of being as insipid as any other puddle of provincialism," and thereafter the Bloomsberries rarely missed a chance to put Lewis down...
...account that emerges from that brief visit is, as one would expect, quickened by a novelist's eye. Rushdie the symbolist notes that the wife of the deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle was named Hope and that the Ministry of Culture goes by the acronym MINICULT. Rushdie the ironist observes that the campesinos battling "U.S. imperialism" dine to the radio accompaniment of Born in the U.S.A...