Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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English 170c American Novel to 1900. Half-course (spring term). Tu., Th., and (at the pleasure of the instructor) Sat., at 11. Professor Murdock...
...Yearling. Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman in an expensive Technicolored version of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' novel about poor folks in Florida's scrub country (TIME...
Elsewhere in this first novel by 21-year-old Peggy Bennett of Apalachicola, Fla. there is still more hair-raising prose. The story, probably more or less autobiographical, is that of three children (the varmints) who grow up on the wrong side of the tracks in a town like Apalachicola. Author Bennett describes their environment sympathetically, and now & then probes their moods with humor and delicate skill. But more often she assaults her readers with rhetoric ("0 God, what jubilance, exuberance, terror and pain"), plagues them with questions ("What is love? . . . What are you, Pivot?"), emotes, postures, harangues...
Enormously earnest and energetic, The Varmints is also enormously overwritten, and naive. Walt Whitman might have tried a novel like this at 21, had he been born a girl and been exposed to the heat of Freud, Faulkner, Dos Passes, Fannie Hurst and Gulf Coast Florida...
...behavior during a saunter down a street in spring, of her exhausting stratagems to avoid seeming snubbed at a dance, had a precision and pathos more than worthy of the writer whom Tarkington regarded as his master, William Dean Howells-almost worthy of Henry James. But why was this novel as a whole inferior to Howells, James or Edith Wharton, and why has Tarkington never been thought a strong figure among U.S. writers of fiction? The simplest answer is that for all his abilities he was incurably sentimental...