Word: novelizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...thought that the AIDS scare couldn't touch you, that you were removed from the horrors of the disease for which there is no cure, read Alice Hoffman's At Risk and think again. A modern day novel which takes place in a town on the Massachusetts North Shore, At Risk teaches that no one is safe from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome and that all of us are exposed to more than the medical harms of the AIDS virus...
Hoffman's novel suggests that in adition to the phyiscal torture of AIDS, the disease wreaks mental and emotional havoc on those in contact with the diseased. At Risk is a novel with a message: with such a sweeping affect, the virus can only be stopped if we work together and not against each other to educate the ignorant and fight the paranoia and irrationality that has infected our society...
Hoffman's theme about cooperation and AIDS is perhaps the strongest aspect of the book. The style of the novel is almost strictly dialogue, and when Hoffman attempts to include detailed description in the book, it seems artificial. But then again, the style of Hoffman's book may just reflect her view of the AIDS crisis. Simple cooperation is what she says is needed to find a cure for the virus, and excess analysis and irrelevant details are unnecessary and best forgotten...
...novel's opening words are "there is a wasp in the kitchen," and with such an ominous beginning we are immediately set on edge, armed with the knowledge that somewhere in the novel, someone is in danger. The wasp scare turns out to be incidental, but it does serve to introduce us to the family of main characters whose lives are destined to fall apart...
...Malcolm Bradbury would have us believe. A superior comic novelist (his 1976 The History Man may be the funniest English academic novel this side of Lucky Jim), Bradbury is also a hard-working critic, a professor of American studies at the University of East Anglia and, at 55, a man disinclined to suppress the cholers of middle age. Unsent Letters consists of 18 imaginary, therefore utterly forthright, responses to his junk mail...