Word: novelized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even if you're not into rap, hip-hop is all around you. It pulses from the films you watch (Seen a Will Smith movie lately?), the books you read (even Tom Wolfe peels off a few raps in his best-selling new novel), the fashion you wear (Tommy Hilfiger, FUBU). Some definitions are in order: rap is a form of rhythmic speaking in rhyme; hip-hop refers to the backing music for rap, which is often composed of a collage of excerpts, or "samples," from other songs; hip-hop also refers to the culture of rap. The two terms...
Even Tom Wolfe, who documented the counterculture in the '60s and greed in the '80s, found himself buying a stack of hip-hop records in order to understand Atlanta in the '90s for his best-selling book A Man in Full. In several sections of his novel, Wolfe offers his own sly parodies of today's rap styles: "How'm I spose a love her/ Catch her mackin' with the brothers," Wolfe writes in a passage. "Ram yo' booty! Ram yo' booty!" Most of the characters in A Man in Full are a bit frightened by rap's passion...
...generations deep. Blaszka, then, is a fictional place where the Canadian author attempts to link emotionally and spiritually with her unknown forebears. Like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County and Garcia Marquez's Macondo, Nattel's imagined backwater is shot through with mythic significance. Even the river of the novel's title surges with the metaphorical force of Mother Ganges...
...Offutt knows his people--Kentucky men, drinkers, loners unsurprised at being kicked out by wives or girlfriends. He dreams in their language: "The next time I visited Tarvis, I drank the neck and shoulders out of a fifth while he talked." But Tarvis commits suicide in an elaborate, pop-novel way. Another man, a trucker, picks up a woman in a bar, is later arrested for dynamiting a dam, still later learns that the woman, for murky reasons, blew up the dam. Not much of this is convincing, and the author, a gifted realist, needs to look again at real...
...with Ellis' American Psycho, what stabs out at you here--more than the violence, gratuitous sex and endless references to famous people and clothes--is the novel's length. The idea--models so solipsistic that they become terrorists--is a good-enough one for a short story of 15 pages, but it's unsustainable at 482. Ellis' writing can be sharp, though, and after the first inanely repetitive 185 pages, the book succeeds in delivering a creepy sense of dread about our culture. Glamorama's contribution to the world may be the motto of its main character, a male model...