Word: novelized
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...tremendous power in American fiction. She's the author of Housekeeping, a transcendently weird, overpoweringly sad book that was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1982, and Gilead, which won it in 2005, almost a quarter-century later. When Robinson writes--as she does in her new novel, Home (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 325 pages)--that the white hair of a sleeping old man is "like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming," her similes are so precise and so beautiful that one knows one should not be bored. In her essays, Robinson...
...that, like practically all children's entertainment, the books themselves pay lip service to the beauty and value of books. Amy is an obsessive reader - "Young lady, close that book!" her aunt snaps at her in the second chapter of The Maze of Bones. Likewise, one of the novel's key scenes takes place in grandmother Grace's secret library. "She loved books," we learn. "She loved them very much." But would Amy or Grace have picked up The Maze of Bones? Scholastic's strategy seems to be predicated on the idea that kids don't actually like to read...
...Scholastic Corporation bought the U.S. rights to a young-adult fantasy novel by an unknown English author for $105,000. That was a lot of money at the time, especially to the not yet ultra-rich Joann Rowling, but it turned out to be the bargain of the century - that one, and probably this one too. Over the next decade or so Scholastic went on to print (spoiler alert!) over 140 million Harry Potter books. (Read about Harry Potter's last adventure here...
...Bush has glided effortlessly through this presidency without a false step--an American sphinx, although one whose very presence conveys intimations of wisdom. Sittenfeld takes full creative advantage of that intelligent vagueness, and her novel encourages readers to do the same. I wonder, for example, what the First Lady would make of Jane Mayer's extraordinary account of the Bush Administration's torture policy, The Dark Side, which I read simultaneously with American Wife. It is no small astonishment that Sittenfeld's portrait of the President and his circle made Mayer's horror story more plausible for me: suddenly...
Sittenfeld's first novel, Prep, was distinguished by the dead-on observations of upper-class life by a working-class narrator--a narrator, one imagines, not unlike Sittenfeld herself, who was jolted from Cincinnati to the rarefied precincts of the Groton School in Massachusetts. There is a similar class consciousness in American Wife, especially in the luscious passages in which Alice describes her first encounters with the Blackwell family at its summer estate, Halcyon, on Lake Michigan. The Blackwells are overwhelming, especially the materfamilias, known as Maj (short for "Her Majesty"). They are classic inbred Wasps, fetishizers of the threadbare...