Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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PETER TAYLOR, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1985, has written a novel to make critics feel their tremendous responsibility. How can the reviewer force his reader to understand that A Summons to Memphis, this sharply perceptive, humorous novel of only 200 pages, should be read at once? How can he demand, "Just stop what you're doing right now and read this book," without seeming either blunt or irrelevant...
...book's Southern veneer, however, does not make it parochial. All the peculiar colloquial mannerisms reinforce an imaginative sense of Americana that makes no one a stranger to the world of this novel. Taylor's portrait of Memphis conveys the duality of life, desultory and crazy at alternate moments...
Readers who insist that a book teach them something of momentous importance will find this novel more than adequate. The quirks and unexpected twists of life are examined with care that exposes layer upon layer of meaning. Loving family relationships, studied unsparingly, pulse with hidden resentments. Social conventions--"exchanging commonplaces and untruths"--are scrutinized to reveal the complexity beneath cool facades. Courtship, marriage, remarriage, cohabitation, bachelorhood and spinsterhood--all achieve an encompassing inventive dimension...
...Memphis provides it. The comedy is situational, two spinster sisters preventing their octagenerian father from remarrying; descriptive, this same eccentric duo frequenting nightclubs, dressed in sequined, clingy, front-and-back plunging fashions; and double-edged, undercut by a gently cynical realism. The comic sensibility is particular to Taylor's novel, but the truths revealed are universal...
...Enchanter is hardly the "dead scrap" that Nabokov called it when he first wrote it in Paris. The short novel has the appeal of the author's distinct style. It demonstrates his method of patterning fiction which, in Nabokov's words, combines "the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable...