Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...piercers whining about McJobs; latchkey legacies, fearful of commitment. Passive and powerless, they were content, it seemed, to party on in a Wayne's Netherworld, one with more antiheroes--Kurt Cobain, Dennis Rodman, the Menendez brothers--than role models. The label that stuck was from Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel, Generation X, a tale of languid youths musing over "mental ground zero--the location where one visualizes oneself during the dropping of the atomic bomb: frequently a shopping mall...
Chris Offutt is a prize-winning short-story writer (Kentucky Straight), and in his tough, funny, sometimes brilliantly written first novel, he can't quite shake the habit. The Good Brother (Simon & Schuster; 317 pages; $23) could not be simpler or more direct in its narrative plan: a good man, Virgil Caudill, caught in a crushing predicament not of his making, commits a murder that seems unavoidable, abandons his home in the Kentucky hill country and survives precariously in Montana. The pages that narrate this contain no misdirection, no writerish word tasting, not even a flashback or shift in point...
...pieces of the novel don't really hang together. There are at least three such segments, almost distinct enough to be separate stories. The first is lazy, easy, short--no more than a dozen pages--an ear-perfect comedy routine of the ancient, comfortable insults that men use to get through a day of work. Virgil Caudill, in his early 30s, is laboring his way up to foreman on the Rocksalt, Ky., garbage-collecting crew. He and his pals jaw away at one another about an almighty hangover one of them has shown up with, about a flashy woman...
...which point the novel and hero again change character. Virgil falls among militia fanatics, whose bellicose posturing he watches without comprehension. As a Kentuckian, he understands a gun culture, but not the Westerners' devout hatred of the Federal Government. By now he is a wholly passive observer, as Offutt's narration heads off at right angles to itself, and the militia crazies prepare to end the tale in righteous fury. The author can't do for the Montana Aryans what he did for the Rocksalt garbage crew, which is to see them sympathetically, from the inside out. No one else...
...Supplemental materials and articles] allow more room for arguments among students," he adds. "A book that tells the story of a historical event can be compared to a novel version of the same event or to technical material. Students can see how each text treats the material and compare for themselves...