Word: novelized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Saville's emotional barrenness seems the result of the meanness of life in the village. He has no political instincts, and Novelist Storey (This Sporting Life and the play The Changing Room) is not pamphleteering. But his moving novel is what used to be called a social document; it demonstrates with harrowing examples that there is nothing ennobling about desperate and ill-paid labor...
...Coover clearly has more on his mind than a malodorous vendetta. Long stretches of his novel read like a fretful imitation of James Joyce's Ulysses. The author lays out thousands of facts about the early 1950s, in general, and June 17-19, 1953, in particular-from Justice William O. Douglas' last-minute order of a stay of execution to the electrocution itself. He quotes extensively (and with considerable repetition) from the Rosenbergs' trial transcripts and their prison letters, President Eisenhower's speeches, contemporary issues of TIME (which becomes a character mockingly called the "National Poet...
...Ulysses, Joyce's catalogue of facts cohered into a unifying myth., Coover's myth requires the diminution of historical figures into pasteboard grotesques; since that much is clear on the novel's opening pages, Coover's torrent of trivia seems like so much padding along the way to a foregone conclusion. He cannot resist parading his data: a nickname is provided for every U.S. President through Truman, and Betty Crocker, like a public address announcer, introduces the 96 U.S. Senators by name at the execution. He also likes to show off his literary ingenuity...
...character named Richard Nixon narrates nearly every other chapter in the novel, where the best and worst in Coover's method coexist with greatest strain. His portrait of an ambitious, insecure and privately obsessed public man is remarkably comprehensive and even moving. If only the character were not named Nixon, all would be well. But Coover allows no distinction between his fiction and the living man; much of the humor depends on a knowledge of the real Nixon's career. As the fictional Nixon's humiliations increase (he is made to appear seminude in front...
Apart from Hadrian the Seventh, a bitingly satirical novel about a destitute writer who becomes Pope, the books of Frederick Rolfe, alias Baron Corvo, are little read. But his life as self-styled genius and unrepentant poseur continues to tantalize. In the 1930s, two decades after Rolfe's death, A.J.A. Symons made him the subject of a celebrated literary whodunit. The Quest for Corvo. In 1971, Donald Weeks wrote a more conventional biography, Corvo. Miriam Benkovitz, an English professor at Skidmore College, offers a new and exhaustive study. Her style is academic and sometimes awkward, but the Baron radiates...