Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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COUPLES, by John Updike. Wife swapping is the game, described in living off-color, but soul saving is the real stake in this rich and subtly rewarding novel by the crown prince of American letters...
...depict the theater as enervating or backward. One barometer of the theatrical weather is the latest work of the best U.S. playwrights. For more than two decades, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams have dominated the American stage in much the way that Hemingway and Faulkner once dominated the novel. Miller is dramatically the descendant of Ibsen and socioeconomically the child of Marx. Williams is dramatically the descendant of Chekhov and psychologically the child of Freud. At present, they seem to have depleted their inheritance...
This is Vladimir Nabokov's second novel, written and published in Russian in 1928, when he was a 28-year-old émigré living in Berlin. It was recently roughed into English by Nabokov's son Dmitri, then tightened and buffed to a cold brilliance by the author. "Of all my novels," says Nabokov, "this bright brute is the gayest. Expatriation, destitution, nostalgia had no effect on its elaborate and rapturous composition...
...Updike made a talented try at marrying priapism to poetry by using hard-breathing language as the preacher. Your review almost succeeded where Updike's novel fails-that is, to see beyond the current public American view of sexuality as a gee-whiz genital performance. But neither your reviewer nor Updike ever really found a way out of Updike's Tarbox. I believe you ought to get some reading done away from the Greenwich commuter's bar car. There's a whole landscape of really living people outside who aren't the lost adolescents...
...wrong, and that Mailer may be closer to the truth. He is a rather lazy and often sloppy journalist, but he can still write like a streak. Whether that makes him the best writer in America is open to question, but this book, which Mailer labels "History as a Novel" and "The Novel as History," is a bravura performance...