Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...make a novel-sized picture, Cheever's skeletal story had to be fleshed out. Scenarist Eleanor Perry and her director-husband Frank (who made David and Lisa) have done so by turning the gothic into the baroque. A little boy cannot be a symbol of innocence by himself; he must be playing a pipe like Pan. To give Merrill's mental anguish an exterior, a vanilla-colored, bikini-clad girl companion is added. To increase the audience's anguish, Merrill is made to out his hand on her stomach and quote The Song of Solomon: "Thy belly...
These 15 scrupulously crafted stories, all but three of which appeared in The New Yorker, display this ability even better than his controversial crazy-quilt novel, Snow White (TIME, May 26, 1967). In The Indian Uprising, Comanches attack a city whose streets are named Boulevard Mark Clark, Rue Chester Nimitz and George C. Marshall Allee. The narrator is a maudlin drunk who utters battle bulletins and sophisticated banalities with equal apathy. The effect is similar to the sense of unreality created by television when newsreels of carnage run smoothly into advertisements for the good life...
Over the Shoulders. At times, Mishima's single-pattern plot seems to glide in slow, repetitive cycles, freezing faces in glaring expressions like kabuki actors: frenzied passion, cross-eyed frustration. Still, what keeps the novel from being another existentialist dead end is the presence of the author. It is finally not the hang-ups of his characters but the questions Mishima asks about them that fascinate-including the ultimate, curiously Japanese question that his novel tests for itself: Can obsession with death, pushed to an extreme, result in some absolute awareness of life...
Dreyer and Franz occasionally attempt to squirm out of the two-dimensional plane in which Nabokov holds them captive. But most of the time, all three are as flat and glossy as the playing cards suggested by the novel's title. This enables Nabokov to give them the nimble shuffle that characterizes the mercurial plots of all his Action...
Fiction as Artifice. There are other such feints in the novel, including a jarring and inexplicable projection of Franz into a diseased old age, and a lunatic landlord who constantly threatens to break up the game but never does. But in the end, it is the author's stylized and intentionally visible hand that collects all bets. Martha succumbs meekly to pneumonia. Franz, relieved of his responsibilities as stud and killer, leaps into madness. Dreyer continues good-naturedly to misread all signs...