Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...walks through the fields and accompanied by soupy music, much like the middle third of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. Just as they consumate their love, however, he recovers his memory. He abandons her for his celibate priesthood and she dies of a broken heart. In the Emile Zola novel on which the film is based, this ending was clearly intended as an anti-clerical attack. Unfortunately, the sentimentality and lack of reality in the film's portrayal of the priest's return to Eden undermines the contrast between his two lives. And the power of the film fizzles...
...traced back to Jane Eyre (1847), both a superb novel and the prototypical romance. The haughty Rochester had to be maimed and blinded before he was suitably domesticated as a mate for the governess heroine. If this deep psychological lode still runs through newly raised consciousnesses, then The Thorn Birds will probably clean up as handsomely as its promoters hope. In any case, its fate will be a barometer of taste circa the late '70s. McCullough has not made literature. For a season or so, her book will make commercial history. Paul Gray
...Anne Tyler can no longer be called a prodigy; she remains prodigious. Her work is marked by the traditions of the South-but not those of the Southern novel. Her seven books contain none of the classic grotesques or theological underpinnings. Tyler prefers trademarks of her own: a firm sense of region and family and a sure and witty touch with her characters. Her books are advocacies of affirmation; in Earthly Possessions she again demonstrates that profound gentleness and beauty can reside in the plainest of people...
Rock Lyricism. Earthly Possessions is not Tyler's best book. The annealing human relationships that mark her other fiction no longer dominate. For the first time she has written a novel in the first person, and the filigree light she usually casts on her characters seems dimmed. Simms displays a kind of rock lyricism, but he is a figure without impact. "This person," he says of his girl friend, "is bound to have something to do with me. I mean it ain't love, but what is it? Worse than love, harder to break. Like...
Tsuga 's Children is a novel that was bound to be written in a time of lowered sights and the repackaging of conventional verities. Thomas Williams, who won the National Book Award in 1975 for The Hair of Harold Roux, now gives us a fantasy spun from the loose threads of The Lord of the Rings, The Whole Earth Catalogue, Carlos Castaneda and the Environmental Protection Agency. Set on a timeless, mythical Western frontier, the novel cultivates a modern delusion. As the author says, "It is a story that I hope might remind its readers that at our best...