Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Based on Voltaire's eponymous novel, Candide follows the loss of innocence of four young characters, who hail from the German town of Westphalia. This quarter features the tantalizing servant girl Paquette (Leslie Blumenthal), and Candide (Mark Meredith), the poor bastard cousin of both the narcissistic Maximilion (David Chase) and of the beautiful Cunegonde (Nan Hughes). All four are under the tutelage of the wise, omnipresent, and somewhat jaded Pangloss played superbly by Jon Tolin Pangloss also serves as the show's magnificent narrator--Voltaire in a similar vein to Salieri's narration in the stage production of Amadeus. From...
Coming from the man who, in Love Story, captured the Harvard of the early '60s right down to 'Cliffie bitchiness and the secular religion that is Crimson hockey, it's no surprise that the college portions of the novel ring true. The one problem here is that the period 1954-58 was not, to put it mildly, a time of campus unrest or even great social shakeups. Segal makes up for this with painstaking accounts of such bygone rigors as the Step Test and the Swim Test, while ignoring real campus news like the hockey heyday of Bob (really...
...believable accounts of "life after college" in the novel-of-Harvard genre--chief among them Anton Myrer '44s. The Last Convertible--are almost absent from the late sections of Segal's magnum opus. As far a comparisons go, let it be said that Rona Jaffe '51 has a lock on the 25th Reunion trash novel category of this ilk, and Class Reunion wasn't anywhere near as pretentious as The Class, Even Love Story, while making no attempts at profundity (except, of course, in its one infamous and unfortunate definition of love), has its place in this venerable category...
Babette takes drugs but not your average drugs. Responding to a tabloid advertisement--"Live Forever!"--she becomes involved in an illicit experiment, ingesting secret pills to assuage her Fear of the Unknown. Jack is clued into her shenanigans and, typically enough in this novel, confronts her with his suspicions over the kitchen tabl. It is a touchy subject for Babette: "To the best of my knowledge, Jack, I'm not taking anything that could account for my memory lapses. On the other hand I'm not old. I haven't suffered an injury to the head and there's nothing...
...fooled by the novel's obsession with death, culture, freedom, sex and sanity. White Noise is not some peevish tabloid revision of 1984. The book never stays sour and it never makes the tiring (because irrefutable) claim that TV has become the average man's Big Brother. Instead, DeLillo writes like a stand-up comedian building variations around a central 326-page-long joke. The media, neo-angst about World War 111, and trendy consumer society constitute one large punching bag, and the deadpanned oneliners seem endless. DeLillo has the greatest sense of the macabre since Poe, although without...