Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Natural Arena. Styron calls The Confessions of Nat Turner not a historical novel but a "meditation on histo ry." There are echoes in it of Melville's Benito Cereno, a tale of a Negro slave rebellion at sea. Like Melville, Styron is fascinated by the evil of slavery and its inevitable connection with violence and corruption. The novels of the Puritanical giants of the 19th century were propelled by the driving force of implacable fate; so is Nat Turner. But here Styron makes his own departure. In Melville, Hawthorne and Twain, there is always at least a memory...
Promise Fulfilled. William Styron, 42, left the South 20 years ago, but he goes home again in his books to stir old ashes. His first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), won for him that dubious badge, "promising." And so the book was-an earnest and sometimes discerning attempt, in the Southern magnolia school of fiction, to deal with the failure of a marriage...
William Golding is a philosophical novelist whose moral theorems in hu man geometry are demonstrated with severe economy. His originality lies in his ability to trace complex psychological diagrams within the traditional form of the novel without technical stunts or verbal virtuosity. His art concerns extreme situations and final choices...
...loves ever'body, then we'uns got to love ever'body too?" Christy Huddleston, the new 19-year-old mission schoolmarm, can handle that question easily, but God and the reader have their task cut out for them in this relentlessly uplifting honeypot. A first novel by the author of A Man Called Peter, this book tells of the Cutter Gap mountain mission in East Tennessee back in 1912: isolated mountaineers, moonshine, feuds, babies. Author Marshall concentrates laboriously on three priggish mission staffers: the dewy-eyed Christy, a saintly Quaker lady, and a bombastic young preacher...
Styron's book is spoken by Nat as he lies in jail, beaten, chained, freezing, starving, and waiting to be hanged. The progression of time from the start to the end of the novel is short--it covers a few passing moments with Gray in jail, at the trial, and then in the jail again before the execution. In between these events are Nat's recollections of his own past. Styron's weaving of past and present is complex but in no way confusing. It is a great credit to Styron's art that he can leap about chronologically...