Word: novelization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Audrey Schulman's second novel, Swimming with Jonah is about Jane Guy, "the awkward, insecure child of a world renowned physician and a beautiful Bostonian ballerina" who goes to attend Queen's Medical School on a tiny Indonesian island. Queen's is the last chance for extremely wealthy students who have failed to get into any medical school. Tuition is the only requirement for acceptance. Isolated and outside the jurisdiction of American law, Queen's is "the boot camp of medical schools," motivating its students by any means necessary--namely bullying and psychological abuse. According to the publicist, thrust into...
Though Jane's character is constantly worked on--even labored at--it is so insubstantial, so suppressed by its own struggle to define itself that Jane never appears to us as a real person. This is the novel's greatest setback: it doesn't manage to outgrow its fairy tale from. We have the castle, the king and the queen. We have the princess who doesn't fit into her role, who pretends to an identity of her own, who steps out of line. We have a sort of conflict, a sort of quest, and eventually our princes resolves...
...this point, you may be wondering why this novel is called Swimming with Jonah. At Queen's, Jane meets a second year student called Keefer. Keefer is "bony as a bird," a gaunt, nervous man with an uncontrollable stutter. Having flunked one of his first-year classes, Keefer is marked out by the teachers as a failure and tortured more than anyone else. His only solace is Johan, a partially tame shark he keeps in a sea-pen not far from his cabin. Schulman attempts to use Jonah as a sort a of underpinning for this section of the novel...
...addition to his work in biology and mechanics, McMahon was also an accomplished writer who received acclaim for several novels in which scientists were the protagonists. His 1987 novel Loving Little Egypt won him the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Rosenthal Award. McMahon also authored Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry: A Novel and McKay's Bees...
...with Glamorama, Ellis' most recent product, the applause has ended. Most say the book is lousy due to a nerdy narrative (models pose as international terrorists), way too many "droppings" and an awkward "moral" at the end. Critics wish this novel were more understated like his classics American Psycho or Less Than Zero...