Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Five-and-a-half years later, after the publication of his second novel, Of Time and the River, Wolfe traveled to Paris. There he met Sylvia Beach, owner of the noted English bookstore Shakespeare and Company. She thought Wolfe "indubitably a young man of genius" but "perhaps very unsatisfactory as a social being...
...typed pages--about eighty thousand words, or the size of an average novel--that, covering a period of only about five minutes, recaptured every move, gesture and word uttered in a long, and largely pointless, conversation designed to get Eliza Gant from the kitchen of her house into a car waiting in front, so that she, Luke, and Eugene could take a short ride...
...Wolfe never produced a book developing such themes. This task was left for an editor, Edward C. Aswell of Harper and Brothers, who published Wolfe's last novel, You Can't Go Home Again (as well as his penultimate novel, The Web and The Rock) after his death at the age of 38. It contained pieces of social criticism, which Aswell gathered together and heavily edited, and it touched on such subjects as economic depression, social decadence and fascism...
Gordimer takes risks with Hillela. Feminists may not be happy with a character whose identity and importance depend so thoroughly on the men she sleeps with. Early in the novel the author starts dropping hints that Hillela will someday be famous, and that of course is what happens. The former beach girl becomes the wife and then the widow of an important black revolutionary, assassinated by South African security forces. She later marries another black, who becomes President of his (unnamed) liberated country. She hobnobs with Indira Gandhi and Bishop Desmond Tutu. She and her husband are honored guests...
...Hillela is more than just another woman who has turned sexual attractiveness to her own advantages. Gordimer writes that her heroine "has never been one to make mistakes when following her instincts," and this judgment is confirmed throughout the novel. Hillela's behavior, even at its loosest and least conventional, does not seem calculated but rather a natural response to the proper, perhaps even the moral, demands of shifting situations. Looking back on his time with her, a friend from the early days says, "She was innocent." Later, marked by personal tragedy and the rough- and-tumble life...