Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...private stock to hoi polloi. Anyone with the price of four issues of Esquire magazine could oink over the deviances of their social betters. Each issue carried a "chapter" of what Capote promised would be his most important work. He called it Answered Prayers and described it as a novel-in-progress about New York and European high society...
...expect? Did this worldly virtuoso of American prose really believe he could tell and still kiss, or did he make a calculated career move? Capote was, after all, the literary imp who said, "A boy has to hustle his book," and in a preface to Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel, Random House Editor Joseph Fox notes that the author considered himself to be a master publicist...
...willing prisoner of passion. One of Oates' main subjects has always been the irrational nature of intense feelings. Love, says Warren near book's end, "seems to carry with it no knowledge." The same could be said of lust, fear and anger, emotions that are generously apportioned to the novel's characters. The effect is dramatic but limiting, like old-fashioned literary naturalism in which free will is swamped by determinism and animal instincts...
Unlike so many of her contemporaries, Oates has the imagination and the ambition to attempt a big novel. But she overdoes it, as if in the grip of a writing demon. Frequently the book seems compiled rather than composed, facts and fiction accreting into a formidable but unshapely mass. There are even chunks on boxing in the '50s, as if the fight game had the same historical impact as the Rosenberg trial or the policies of "Engine Charley" Wilson, the Secretary of Defense. You Must Remember This takes lots of wild swings; it is what happens when a fearless slugger...
Columnist William Safire turns to fiction with a 1,125- page Civil War novel but is swamped by facts. -- A powerful Joyce Carol Oates...