Word: novelized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Barth is least of all an idiot, and this schema for each of his characters obviously governs his own writing of Letters--this novel that incorporates each of his past protagonists, that takes every one of his old plots and recycles it, that is engaged in eternal omphaloskepsis, a sort of literary autism. That's it--the burden of the past: not a roster of great literary forebears but the author's own bibliography. Barth is getting older, and he hasn't found his Theme. Letters is his middle-age-crisis objectified into a monstrosity. No one can fault Barth...
TAKE A FAMOUS CHARACTER as protagonist, add a wife and kids and a few servants, mix in a fair amount of imagined 'typical daily life' and arrive at the typewriter with the ready made historical novel. Thus we learn how Freud puts on his shirt, or how Lincoln liked his eggs. Our interest in these quotidian events lies mainly in the protagonist's eventual fame or historical dimensions...
...same public stature, in fact, very little has been written about him: he made a fortune in shoe-manufacturing, and the Pusey Library archives hold a slim volume on the gigantic endowments he left to Harvard. Though he arrives at his true life circumstances by the end of the novel, McKay first undertakes a long fictional journey to Kansas and back. McMahon has given him depth, complicated his life, and intersected his life with other', real and fictional. But in the end the real McKay surfaces, a great deal more intriguing for the reader than such a philanthropist would have...
Later, during the night he spends in Lonoff's study, Nathan climbs atop a writing desk and a Henry James novel, then presses his ear to the ceiling to better eavesdrop on a pathetic love dialogue between Lonoff and Amy. Safely descending his makeshift ladder, he laments...
...Nathan stretches to the far-fetched in his attempt to imagine real life. Several plot contrivances mar the novel. But its richness and vitality cannot be overstated. It reads quickly, much like a longish (180 pages) short story, and so stimulating a novel is hard to relinquish to the bookshelf. The Ghost Writer ends too soon...