Word: novelization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...MASON & DIXON (Henry Holt) Thomas Pynchon's vast novel retraces the progress of the men who drew the line between the colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland. For all its Pynchonesque tomfooleries--a talking dog, a four-ton cheese--the tale is somber, elegiac. Mason and Dixon come to realize that their triumph means an end to the wilderness, the imposition of order on "the realm of the Sacred...
...Underworld (Scribner) Despite its title, Don DeLillo's 11th and most ambitious novel is not about organized crime. DeLillo takes on nothing less ambitious than the buried life of the cold war, the specter of nuclear annihilation as experienced by a large group of vividly rendered characters. The story begins with Bobby Thomson's famous home run in 1951 and moves back and forth over the following four decades, showing how we all got here from there...
...Cold Mountain (Atlantic Monthly Press) Imagine Odysseus walking through the blue mountains of North Carolina in the ghostly half-light at the end of the Civil War. Charles Frazier's miraculous (and best-selling) first novel is as spare as timeless myth, one man's yearning homeward. Yet its deeply local details, its twiggy smell of roots and solitary eccentrics, evoke the spirit of Thoreau--and the Taoist hermits who once haunted the Cold Mountains of old China...
...American Pastoral (Houghton Mifflin) The title is ironic--a Philip Roth specialty. There is precious little rural peace and harmony in this scorching novel about a prosperous New Jersey couple whose good life is destroyed when their daughter becomes a '60s terrorist. In Roth's earlier novels, parents tended toward the comic and repressive. Not here. The author renders the Job-like suffering of a father and mother over a lost child with characteristic emotional force and verbal energy...
...Small Things (Random House) Arundhati Roy's bold debut achieves an intensity that will feel familiar to fans of D.H. Lawrence. The author sometimes seems too clever for her novel's good, but her material triumphs. Three small children, a blue Plymouth and the lushness of southern India merge into a gripping story of passion thwarted by prejudice...