Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...exception. One of the few bright spots in Harvard's otherwise undistinguished English department is its creative writing courses, which have been taught for the past few years by Mary Robison, a frequent contributor of short stories to The New Yorker, and Christopher Leland, a novelist. Leland's new novel, Mrs. Randall, is proof positive that the man can do, as well as teach...
...fast-paced story follows. the life of Gambetta Stevenson, from his childhood in a small Southern Town during the first World War to his career as a semi-successful Hollywood actor. Though Leland packs a thick wad of detail to satisfy the historical novel lovers out there, the real story is the obsessive love Stevenson bears for his stepmother, Mrs. Randall...
Leland has almost succeeded in putting together the perfect postmodern Southern novel--you can taste the chunks of Faulkner, Warren, and Flamingo Road that he has dropped in his literary Cuisinart and spread across the pages. The only thing is, Leland has ground his sources so fine that Mrs. Randall lacks the kind of semi-mocking tone that gives the post-modern credo its camp appeal. Instead, Leland has invested his novel with the virtues of the great Hollywood dramas of the 20's and 30's, where plots and characters you had seen many times before were distilled...
...This novel, William Golding's tenth, picks up where Rites of Passage (1980) left off. Sequels ordinarily suggest the path of least resistance, the easiest way for a writer to capitalize on past accomplishments. Indeed, Rites of Passage marked one of the happier points of Golding's long career; it won the Booker Prize, England's most prestigious publishing award, and three years later its author received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Small wonder that Golding might want to extend a book that earned so much acclaim. The greater surprise is that he succeeds...
Close Quarters is more than the education, under duress, of its narrator. The novel is a vivid historical reconstruction of what it once felt like to set off for the other end of the earth relying on nothing but the mercies of wind and sea. This experience is an archetype of Western literature (Genesis, The Odyssey), fraught with several millenniums of encrusted expectations. For the most part, Golding is content to let the symbolic dimensions of his tale remain implicit. "What a world a ship is! A universe!" Talbot exclaims at one point, but the energy he might have devoted...