Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...people have wondered whether William Saroyan had it in him to write a whole, continuous novel. The Human Comedy, though it inevitably leaves its grandiloquent title looking like a half-inflated blimp, is a very nice novel indeed. It is, unfortunately, too nice to be as good, as it might have been if Saroyan were capable not only of goodness but of a concern with evil...
...Whole Heart by Helen Howe may sound like a mild fit of coughing but is, in fact, a remarkable first novel. Dedicated to the proposition that half a conscience is worse than none at all, it is an excruciating story of "the typical Anglo-Saxon" and of four women who loved him-a story told entirely in terms of their letters and diaries. It is by turns howlingly funny, shrewd, sinister, ferocious, painful with the pain of a fluctuating personality...
...emerged from World War I, Jim seemed capable of great things. William Lyon Phelps led the reviewers' chorus in praising his first novel, Young Glory. Hurd was perplexed between the rich advances offered him by Publisher H. H. Ramsay and more modest prospects which would make serious writing possible. Ramsay's brash, glittering daughter Barbara attracted him. When she turned him down, he ran to his second cousin Mary for comfort, mistook his infantilism for love, deceived Mary to boot. He married Barbara. Mary moved into spinsterhood, scientific work and philanthropy, became in the end an impressive woman...
...Hurd, unable to forgive his wife her lover, took a mistress named Constance Field, whose letters are perhaps the best thing in the novel. They began with the noisome clatter, wit, self-love and tinny ribaldry of an avid young female intellectual. They moved toward maturity and then into a hell soon matched by the hell Authoress Howe constructs for her hero...
Both literature and life (in which Upton Sinclair is more warmly interested) are crueler and more disenchanted than he knows. The time may come when Upton Sinclair's novel and history will foam down the homestretch neck & neck. Meanwhile, charging along a few lengths behind history (this volume ends in 1937), calling the fouls in a loud, clear voice, and always polite to his horse, Upton Sinclair is one of his century's most gallant losers...