Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...course, there's more to the novel than scaling the heights of Braithwaite's brow in pursuit of Flaubert. At the heart of Braithwaite's literary musings lies an attempt to come to terms with his own life, his failed marriage, and the death of his wife. The issue of the relation between Flaubert's life and art gradually dovetails into the narrator's biography. His attempts to understand are shot through with melancholy, as the past remains elusive: "My wife: someone I feel I understand less well than a foreign writer dead for a hundred years. Is this...
Paradoxically, Flaubert's Parrot is an extraordinarily successful novel about failure, about the emptiness that remains in the scholarly grasp of anyone who tries to completely recapture the past. At one point, Braithwaite says in an aside: "I know this. Sometimes the past may be a greased pig; sometimes a bear in its den; and sometimes merely the flash of a parrot, two mocking eyes that spark at you from the forest." Braithwaite's--and the novel's--wisdom lies in his realization that the overgrown byways of literary history may not lead anywhere in particular, but the stroll itself...
...might think that a guy who hadn't published a novel in eleven years would show a few signs of nervousness, make a false move here and there, when he gave it another try. But Bruce Jay Friedman, who was almost certainly, pound for pound, the peppiest black humorist of the whole 1960s (Remember Stern ? A Mother's Kisses ?), hasn't exactly been idle during his long layoff. He wrote The Lonely Guy's Book of Life, which not only advised single fellas how to cope but became a motion picture vehicle for Steve Martin. He did the screenplay...
...happy liaison with Lewes produces few letters, because for 24 years the couple are hardly ever out of each other's sight. Still, Eliot's correspondence is full of references to the man who insists that she write fiction and who encourages his self- doubting and often depressed companion, novel after novel. In gratitude she chooses his first name for her pseudonym, and her last because "Eliot was a good mouth-filling, easily-pronounced word...
Crack a Peter De Vries novel at random and you are likely to find a Midwesterner trying just a little too hard to keep from making a fool of himself among the sophisticates of the Northeast. The journey from Pocock, Ill., to Decency, Conn., has been played forward, backward and sideways, sometimes strictly for laughs and often, as in The Blood of the Lamb, to illustrate that comedy is not the opposite of tragedy but its Siamese twin...