Word: novelization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Gasps went up when Updike, receiving a lifetime-achievement medal, said the word Wolfe. He had just pricked A Man in Full in the New Yorker, calling its author "a talented, inventive, philosophical-minded journalist, coming into old age," who goes for broke on a novel that is just "entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form." At the podium, a smiling Updike read Wolfe's vivid if catty 1964 account of Updike receiving his first National Book Award: "He squinted at the light through his owl-eyed eyeglasses, then he ducked his head and his great thatchy...
Bravo to Paul Gray for his well-written article about Tom Wolfe's reappearance on the literary scene with his new novel, A Man in Full [BOOKS, Nov. 2]. It seems that Gray's initial nervousness about interviewing Wolfe proved to be without cause, and Gray's well-crafted prose honors his subject. Further praise for focusing on Wolfe as a writer and respecting his privacy by leaving out irrelevant details like the size of the advance he got from his publishers. DAVID GEORGE MOORE Austin, Texas...
Wolfe has said he wants to write realistic novels that chronicle our times the way Charles Dickens captured the 19th century. U.S. readers showed their approval of Dickens by waiting in long lines for hours to attend his lectures and readings. In the 20th century, the sizable first printing of Wolfe's new book suggests there are at least 1.2 million readers waiting to purchase A Man in Full, the latest conventional novel about lives we can understand. LUANNE FEIK Greenville...
DIED. RUMER GODDEN, 90, exquisitely lyrical British novelist, playwright and poet; in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. Godden set much of her work in India, where she grew up. Although she wrote a total of 70 books and collections, she was best known for the 1939 novel Black Narcissus, in which nuns fight to establish a school and hospital on a Himalayan mountain. Of the 1946 film version, the prickly Godden observed, "I hate it...Everything about it was phony...
While reading Billy Dead, the reader is trapped with Ray's skewed vision of the world and, what is worse, his sometimes hideously rambling narrative. To pull a novel off with a hero or heroine essentially isolated from society, the protagonist has to be vivid and interesting, which is why this novel suffers by any comparison to Bastard out of Carolina or any other tale of an abusive childhood. While Ruth Anne Boatwright remains in the reader's memory, Ray Johnson is easily forgotten, with only the horrible tales of abuse to vaguely haunt the readers, tales of suffering with...