Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...timing; ironies are implied, not spelled out. Anyone who has followed Joan Didion's career as a magazine writer can easily discern the newsprint between her fine lines. Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of her best magazine work, brought wide praise in 1968. With the publication of her novel Play It As It Lays in the summer of 1970, Didion established herself as a distinctive voice in American writing. Hers was a lean, laconic voice that delineated the parched hide and blistering tarmac of Southern California. The book desiccated human experience. As Didion now sees it, her novel...
This capacity is the secret of Didion's power. It works again in A Book of Common Prayer, a novel whose unreal made real includes a Central American country called Boca Grande. Once more the author writes about a distressed California woman. Charlotte Douglas is the victim of a romantic idealism so hermetic that self-knowledge is impossible. The currents of revolution and privilege scarcely ruffle her hair. Incapable of reflection, Charlotte moves, therefore she is. This unexamined life is filtered through the tough mind of Grace Strasser-Mendana, Colorado-born widow of a Boca Grande plutocrat...
Torpid Tropics. That Grace is an anthropologist and trained observer is of great importance. Any other method of narration might have turned the novel into a pastiche of psychological and social pathology. To begin with, there is Charlotte's education as a norteamericana: "She was immaculate of history, innocent of politics. There were startling vacuums in her store of common knowledge. During the two years she spent at Berkeley before she ran away to New York with an untenured instructor named Warren Bogart, she had read mainly the Brontës and Vogue, bought a loom, gone home...
...profound he-man heroics (For Whom the Bell Tolls) and farragoes of exotic drinks, sports and angst (The Sun Also Rises). The Hemingway adaptation with the most spark left in it today is To Have and Have Not, in which Director Howard Hawks tossed out most of the original novel and wrenched the rest into a racy adventure yarn around Bogart and Bacall...
Islands in the Stream, based on Hemingway's posthumous 1970 novel, is more serious. It is an attempt to capture the elusive strains of tenderness and generosity that could inform Hemingway's writing when he stopped beating his breast. But except for George C. Scott in the leading role, it attempts to do this without anything approaching Hemingway's gifts, tarnished and erratic though they were toward the last. It remains an attempt-earnest and labored. After watching it, one is tempted to say: Come back, Howard Hawks...