Word: novelizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...twelfth novel, British Author and Playwright Fay Weldon has taken a giddy leap back to the fiction style of the 19th century. Enough of angst and ambiguity, of literary experiment. Bring on Trollope's nudging narrator and Dickens' moral confidence. The Hearts and Lives of Men -- surely a Victorian novelist would have come up with a livelier title -- is nonetheless set in modern times, specifically the fast-track London art world of the '60s and '70s. It covers 23 years in the lives of Clifford and Helen Wexford, an attractive, careless pair who marry, remarry, have messy affairs, manage...
...semimemoir, A Boy's Own Story, Edmund White came as close as anyone has to producing the Great American Gay Novel. Its depiction of sexual awakening was vividly specific, yet its emotional terrain -- initial delight leading to guilt and alarm at the strange new force in one's life -- might have evoked adolescence for almost any reader. The Beautiful Room Is Empty, a sequel that takes White into young manhood, is at once clumsier and much more ambitious. At times as pretentious as the title, derived from Kafka, it trots out a succession of irritatingly self-indulgent characters...
Michael J. Fox is a cute guy and a skillful actor. Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City was a cute novel and a polished one when it was all the rage four years ago. Wrapping them up together was not an entirely unreasonable movie-packaging idea. It arrives, however, looking like something that has been kicking around too long in the dead-letter office...
Nothing in this scene overtly suggests the imminence of comic catastrophe. But experienced readers of Thomas Berger will immediately put on their crash helmets and fasten the safety belts. Newcomers are advised to follow suit. The Houseguest, Berger's 15th novel, picks up some of the pieces scattered by the explosive anarchy of his Neighbors (1980). Once again, an apparently stable domestic setting warps and buckles into chaos, and kindred characters struggle to adjust to a world in which the outrageous has suddenly become the norm...
...last novel, Witches of Eastwick, Updike eschewed the first person, using the next best thing: restricted third person narration. Feminists objected to the complete mystification Updike demonstrated towards women in that novel, as he ascribed to them all manner of extraordinary, supernatural abilities. Updike's direct assumption of the female voice in S. is at the very least a gutsy move, a bridging of what Marilynne Robinson called his "perplexed and fascinated distance," from the lives of women...