Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...best performance of the period was in Moshe Mizrahi's 1977 film, La Vie Devant Soi (Madame Rosa in English), in which she played a Jewish ex- prostitute and survivor of a concentration camp. The theme of Jewish life in France was also the subject of her best-selling novel, Adieu, Volodia, which appeared this year. She had previously published two memoirs, Nostalgia Isn't What It Used to Be (1976) and Le Lendemain, elle etait souriante...
...McInerney's first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, assumed cult status within months of publication. Its second-person narrative, cast of cocaine- fueled yuppies and New York City nightclub scenes had an odd, ironic charm that made some 138,000 buyers eager for his next tale. This time the protagonist has upward immobility but no interest in drugs. In fact, Christopher Ransom, an American drifter in Kyoto, has only one enthusiasm: karate. He hangs out at Hormone Derange, a cowboy store, and tries to regain his spiritual bearings with martial arts. Ransom also wants to avoid memories of a girlfriend...
...JOSHUA'S DIFFICULTIES go way back. Richler bases his screenplay on his novel by the same name, something he did before more plausibly and palatably Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. But the novel itself is not that good to begin with. Not Richler's best work, it is a provincial rendition of the self-hating Jewish man's odyssey, his archetypal pursuit of the elusive non-Jewish woman (subtley known as the shiksa...
...trouble is, Richler can't make fun of the condition because he suffers from it. He harbors so much anger, presumably owing to his own mother, or to his own miserable upbringing in Montreal, that his novel gets bogged down by sheer malice. The fictional Joshua's mother is absurd--a vain, floozy stripper--and his coarse father (adequately played by Alan Arkin, in the film's only good performance) lives a cliche. Richler's story of Jewish lust/angst was better served by Philip Roth in Portnoy's Complaint...
...head. He showed me a photo of a little gazebo he had built over the summer. I in turn revealed that I wanted to be a writer, that I wrote compulsively, and that I had daydreams about being on Carson and Letterman. I showed him the unfinished novel that I had tried to write in senior year...