Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Last month he took two giant strides toward answering critics who say he refuses to grow up, artistically or personally. On June 5 he began directing The Color Purple, an adaptation of Alice Walker's stark, poetic novel about Southern blacks. Eight days later, his live-in love, Actress Amy Irving, presented him with 7-lb. 7 1/2- oz. Max Samuel Spielberg, whom the proud father describes as "my biggest and best production of the year...
Enter The Color Purple, an epistolary novel about incest, sexual brutality, sapphic love and the indomitable will to survive. It did not seem the sort of material Steven Spielberg would touch with a ten-foot wand. Which is precisely why he went for it. "The Color Purple is the biggest challenge of my career," he proclaims. "When I read it I loved it; I cried and cried at the end. But I didn't think I would ever develop it as a project. Finally I said, I've got to do this for me. I want to make something that...
Martha Grimes is an American mystery writer who up till now has forsworn the traditional metier of her countrymen, the novel of action, in favor of dead-on English-village mysteries of the kind wrought by Britons a half-century ago. Her seven novels have all been named for actual pubs, most of them in the English countryside, and until Help the Poor Struggler they have involved a quirky trio: a stereotypically literary, sensitive bachelor detective from Scotland Yard, a fey, scholarly nobleman who has eccentrically given up his titles, and, usually, the nobleman's meddling, Wodehousian aunt. That arch...
...effort features a more pedestrian detective along with her stock characters, a deadly earnest tone and a climactic burst of violence befitting its story of long-calculated revenge. Although the setting remains British, Help the Poor Struggler is rather an American novel, with brooding and cynical overtones of Raymond Chandler ("It wasn't the pale skin of a man who'd not seen enough of the sun. It was more as if one had put a paintbrush to an emotion -- despair, desolation, whatever -- and tinged it in that sickly whitishgray"). Depth of characterization is not Grimes' strong suit...
...socially conscious epoch, the fortunes of the fortunate seem irrelevant; in a time of ethnic narcissism, Wasps are out. Yet as Ralph Graves' canny, discerning work proves, the novel of manners is far from obsolete, and the population of boardrooms and island beaches is as compelling as it was in the Age of Irony (circa...