Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...item in beach paraphernalia is oversized, clear-rimmed sunglasses known as "owl" and "moon" glasses. Most novel are "nudie" glasses, designed by London's Bernard Kayman. Their lenses are tinted at the top, to protect against the sun and replace missing eye makeup. They are clear at the bottom, permitting men to see the wearer's eyes. "Men hate to look at women with dark shades. After all, eyes are one of the things that men look at," explains Kayman. They are, to be sure, part of the total work. But on second thought, what good girl-watcher...
...This novel seems to have been sprayed out of a can. As with most of the new and convenient instant satires, Melinda is compounded of 2% active ingredient and 98% harmless propellant. Even so, it should not be inhaled over a prolonged period...
...first novel, she operates good-naturedly in the postanalysis, guilt-free era. God is not only dead, there never was a birth announcement. The book is a catchy packaging job of the familiar semi-exaggerations about how the super-rich and super-famous flit mindlessly from pleasure to pleasure in ever-tightening circles that lead to self-destruction. With pagan innocence, Melinda herself commits incest, adultery, child neglect, international outrage and multiple murder. Because she is not a character, but the author's representation of nascent id, Melinda cannot suffer hell and damnation. She must be ticketed to limbo...
What is least important about this small, fierce novel is that it is a brilliant stunt-a male author staying undetected, for the length of a book, in the mind of a female main character. Brian Moore does not pull off his wig and bow, nor is there any impulse to applaud. Applause, of course, would mean that the deception had failed. It is, in fact, successful, and Moore earns, with great cleverness, a distinction that many writers are born with-that of being judged as a lady novelist...
...attaining the status of a Frances Parkinson Keyes does not ensure a good novel, however, and it is an achievement quite apart from female impersonation that Moore's novel is excellent. It is a psychological study of one day in the life of Mary Dunne, a pretty woman of 33, married more or less happily to her third husband, a successful playwright. Dunne's day is a series of emotional squalls, between which she ducks in and out of recollected doorways...