Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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JOHN UPDIKE'S new novel, Couples, describes a modern purgatory, a world from which God has withdrawn, a community without grace or light or love. The book, the story of various adulterous affairs among a group of affluent suburban couples, bears an ironic quotation from Paul Tillich that outlines the novel's thesis. The quotation tells us that when the average citizen feels that "the decisions relating to the life of the society to which he belongs are a matter of fate on which he has no influence," then a mood is created that "is favorable to the resurgence...
...affairs of the novel take place against a backdrop of news headlines, introduced peripherally by the author. Like "matters of fate" they impinge hardly at all upon the consciousness of the adulterers. Kennedy's assassination, for example, does not deter a drunken party, for after all, as the host Freddy Thorne says, "I've bought all the booze...
...divest itself of two papers it bought in 1964, the San Bernardino Sun and the Telegram. The company contended that there had been little competition for readers or advertising between its Los Angeles Times and the San Bernardino papers, published 60 miles east of Los Angeles. But in a novel application of the Clayton Antitrust Act, the judge ruled that the purchase discouraged future competition, and would effectively prevent any other newspaper from getting established in the area...
This passage from the ringing first novel in T. H. White's Arthurian cycle, The Once and Future King, is a shade too piteous to be in character. The Sword in the Stone comes so near to being a perfect book that the momentary faltering in Merlyn's tone is worth examining. In her compassionate biography of White, Author Sylvia Townsend Warner suggests that it was White himself who missed his love, who lay at night listening to the roar of his veins, and who swallowed great draughts of learning as a painkiller...
Gass published his fine first novel, Omensetter's Luck, two years ago, when he was 41. He shares James's pragmatism, his commitment to form and to the senses, his cheerless affirmation willed out of an all too obvious despair. The despair seems to rise from the conclusion that ultimate answers are beyond reach; Gass puts his faith in the structure of his prose and the intense physicality of his words. Death imagery crackles through these pages like winter wind through a cornfield, yet the characters have exceptional vitality. A youth watches with unblinking fascination as a farmhand...