Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Aristotle, tragedy's effect was tripartite; it moved from pity to terror to catharsis. By those tenets, as valid as they are venerable, Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer Prize novel The Fixer misses greatness by a third. It has the first two requisites, but it omits any purge of the emotions. Malamud brings his hero, Yakov Bok, to the brink of destruction-or salvation-and freezes the action. There, in Auden's phrase, "the seas of pity lie, locked and frozen in each eye." By definition, the film of The Fixer can aspire to be only two-thirds...
...sufferers. Like the book, the film has no end, only a conclusion: there is no such thing as indifference; an abstention from humanity is a vote for evil. When Yakov goes to trial the story halts, as if the future were epilogue. Unfortunately, it is not. Malamud based his novel on the agonies of a real Russian Jew, Mendel Beiliss, who was finally exonerated. Torn between actuality and false doom, The Fixer becomes a victim of artistic indecision...
...Jones has a gift for sweet and savage satire reminiscent of that unwholesome trio: Nikolai Gogol, Nathanael West and Samuel Beckett. His characters parody themselves in obsessive dead-end conversations, groping their way circularly past each other through muddled clouds of private thought and uncertain motive. In this first novel, his descriptions of hotels, restaurants, odd corners of small towns and the seedy people who inhabit them, haunt the mind's eye. Yet Jones' real talent is for making the improbable seem necessary and the grotesque plausibly humdrum. Perhaps because Jones has caught lobsters, sold boats, worked...
...found by a spin-the-bottle technique, and the real rapport between nations rests on a Jellolike foundation of friendship between Latifundia's President and the American ambassador. Despite the apparently insurmountable handicap of so familiar a scenario, Robert Wool has managed to produce a finely written first novel that explores the personality of a South American nation while revealing the lives and characters of two strong and complex men. Neither of them fits the good-guy, bad-guy stereotypes that infect not only this literary genre but diplomatic thinking about Latin America in general...
...course the change hasn't occurred. The hope of reaching racial harmony soon is probably less than it was ten years ago. Baldwin, the integrationist, has passed out of fashion, though he makes a belated attempt in his latest novel to catch the times...