Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like a number of his contemporaries-Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Irwin Shaw and John Home Burns-Vance Bourjaily salvaged a good first novel (The End of My Life) out of the rubble of World War II. Critics spotted him among this cadre of new novelists, who became part of the curriculum for an American literary renaissance. The smart writers paid no attention. Neither life nor art traipses after textbooks, and the Mailers and Vidals went their separate ways. But Bourjaily, now 54, has never escaped the stigma of premature recognition. On the appearance of each of his next five novels...
Partly with that comic contrast in view, Douglas Wallop (The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant) has just finished a novel about mixed doubles and infidelity in the suburbs. Another effort, Courting by Sue Costello, promises to be a tennis player's version of Fear of Flying. But the best stories of the mixed-doubles scene might better be told by a writer like Edward Albee of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, who could chronicle the explosive marital tensions of the game. "What we'll soon need around here," says California's celebrated tennis pro Vic Braden, "is mixed...
...second honeymoon on the French Riviera. But Kevin, her husband of 16 years, is not with her. He is having trouble getting away from both his medical practice in Belfast and the provincial conviction that a foreign holiday is a waste of good Irish scenery. As any novel reader could tell him, he is not only courting cuckoldry but demanding it. Sheila, of course, falls in love with a handsome American, eleven years her junior, and goes off on a binge of sexual ecstasy well beyond the range of her convent-schooled imagination. The next thing Kevin knows, his wife...
...sober artistry marks The Doctor's Wife as vintage Brian Moore. Sheila Redden may not be as hauntingly memorable as the heroine of Moore's first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1956), but she is the most alluringly complex adulteress to come along in print in some time...
...novel's bright comic surfaces compensate for its lack of depth. But not enough. With its clinical setting and the circle of didactic characters intended to illustrate moral predicaments, The Farewell Party finally seems like a molehill version of The Magic Mountain...