Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...seller lists, sounding financial doom in the midst of a powerful bull market. That was, in fact, in the winter of '87, nine months before reality iced Wall Street. Erdman does not have to worry; quicker than a program trade, here he is, hedging his investments with a sixth novel. The Palace offers no scenario for economic disaster. Quite the contrary. The book is a racy tale of how one clever and gutsy (though not especially honest) fellow can rise from being a Philadelphia coin dealer to owning the splashiest gambling casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City...
...Lehman is a loner who outwits the law and organized crime and favors the company of a hooker who reads Dostoyevsky. All things considered, he is more appealing than the run-of-the-mill Sammy Glick. Erdman's knowledge about money laundering and creative financing firmly establishes the novel's authority. An unabashed weakness for shady operators and a hearty sense of the vulgar should ensure his market share...
...John Updike constructed a plot with some teasing but unacknowledged similarities to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter: an unfrocked New England minister named Roger broods over the infidelity of his wife. This time out, the author makes his indebtedness perfectly clear. S., Updike's 32nd book and 13th novel, opens with two quotations from The Scarlet Letter and with a heroine who is an unmistakable incarnation of Hester Prynne, the most famous adulteress in American literature. Sarah Worth (nee Price) boasts a Prynne among her ancestors and, like Hester, a daughter named Pearl. This mother too is a fallen...
...absence of historical references, an active plot and sharp conflict, the novel is vulnerable to interpretation. Is Bartfuss a wandering Jew in, of all places, Zion? Is his folkloric deathlessness the author's way of saying that, even with their own nation, Jews are eternally restless and unsettled? Or is Bartfuss just suffering from post-Holocaust syndrome: a feeling of withdrawal and loneliness, and an inclination toward "morbid precision, excess awareness, complicated pain...
...wife Kristy (Elizabeth McGovern), goaded on by her folks and his, makes him work embarrassingly hard at producing an offspring -- all to help her fulfill her motherly instincts (Jake has a not too hilarious problem with his sperm count). But having been, at best, an ambivalent bridegroom (goodbye novel writing, hello advertising; goodbye sex as sport, hello sex as duty, with Chain Gang for scoring), he has an underdeveloped feeling for fatherhood...