Word: novelized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...light enough on their feet to write good fiction themselves. Columbia University's Lionel Trilling has tried, and sometimes succeeded. The Other Margaret, his best short story, has become a small classic on the life of Manhattan "liberal" intellectuals and their children. Now he has written his first novel. It gets its title from the opening words of The Divine Comedy,* but in other ways has nothing in common with Dante. It is, in fact, a good and honest novel about the modern inability to accept such a hell and heaven as Dante imagined...
...sardine." He attracted money, elephants, and women. His rise to fame was fast and his ruin faster. By taking his life and those of the people buzzing around him, Duncan draws a picture of circus business at the turn of the century. Focussed on the middle west, the novel throws all the enchantment, the crookedness and the bitter struggle of early circus business against a background a hysterical free enterprise. As the circus grows, its art is replaced by the character and evils of a big corporation. When the companies begin to crash the circus tumbles after them...
While "Gus the Great" is an accurate period piece, replete with all the false morality and ostentation overflowing from the Victorian age, the characters surrounding Gus Burgoyne provide the real heart and value of the book. Mr. Duncan understands the people in his novel; he allows each the perspective of a lifetime and successfully defines the mixture of lunacy and showmanship that makes a trooper. A keen-witted horse trader from Vermont, a bewildered pair of acrobats, and a lion tamer with a complex for abusing both cats and women are all drawn with infinite shading and welded together through...
...collection of character studies, "Gus the Great" is superb; as a continuous story, it falls somewhat short of the mark. Mr. Duncan throws out a wealth of threads during his novel and has difficulty weaving them into a satisfactory knot at the climax. Important characters clash in a weird and incongruous way. While others are forgotten entirely. But regardless of the flaws in its construction, "Gus the Great" is a monumental work, showing both penetrating insight and real sympathy for the circus...
...LIVING NOVEL (256 pp.)-V. S. Pritchett-Reynal & Hitchcock...