Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Brinkley, the protagonist in Robert Mayer's comical novel Superfolks, was sinking into complacent and oh-so-comfortable middle class, middle age life on Swansdown Island, a "suburban pocked" retreat outside New York. Beneath his happily married, proud-daddy exterior, he was helplessly wondering why his superpowers were inexplicably vanishing...
Mayer uses the plight of the aging comic-book hero to parody most of what characterizes America and everything that makes up New York. Shortly after the novel begins, chaos strikes the bankrupt Metropolis. The unpaid and overworked police force have resigned en masse and looting, rape and murder pervade. Brinkley, watching football, curses his bookie and tries to ignore the city's crisis until the fateful thought strikes him, "Is it a conspiracy?" Needless to say, it is. And Brinkley plunges into a crisis of conscience. Should he leave the repose of his suburban home, his loving wife...
...through dialogue, backed up by simple, controlled description. Blatant authorial intrusions are rare. Like his Victorian predecessors, Storey remains outside his characters, looking in; he avoids interior monologues, allo ing the feelings of his characters to surface in their words and actions. Colin is the focal point of the novel--Mr. and Mrs. Saville are always referred to as "his father" and "his mother" even when the antecedent is unspecified--but Storey refuses to lose himself in a single point of view, preferring the role of a restrained omniscient narrator...
Trollope has always had a distinguished following. Nathaniel Hawthorne claimed that he would rather write like Trollope than like Hawthorne. Trollope's novels, he said, "precisely suit my taste, solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale." Tolstoy said that "Trollope kills me, kills me with his excellence." A newer fan was an American Senator by the name of John Kennedy, who was seen reading The American Senator after he won the Democratic nomination in 1960. Former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan always kept a Trollope novel on his night table...
Trollope and his Pallisers were merely the vanguard of a Victorian invasion of the small U.S. screen. This week the Public Broadcasting Service begins a four-part series based on Charles Dickens' Hard Times. Another Dickens novel. Our Mutual Friend, will be presented on PBS next fall, and before the year is out the network plans a serialized biography of the author...