Word: novella
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...complains that success can be lethal. "People always want to collect you for cocktail parties and take you to bed," she says. They have also inundated her with letters spelling out ultimate secrets. Notes Jong: "The whole thing makes me feel like Miss Lonelyhearts in Nathanael West's novella." A self-styled feminist, she recalls the day a high school boy asked her if she wanted to "grow up and be a secretary." Actually she always wanted to be a writer. Deeply affected by the suicide of her friend Anne Sexton, Jong is determined to be a survivor...
...Great Gatsby. Mia Farrow plays the role with all of its attendant splendour and graceful, but inevitably brutish, carelessness. Farrow maintains a delicate balance between a gay childishness with her illicit lover, Gatsby, and a wanton callousness, a total disregard for anybody's feelings. Henry James's novella, Daisy Miller, adapted for the screen by Peter Bogdanovich, is a portrait of exactly that kind of woman. But Cybill Shepherd's performance is slightly more questionable. In fact, the whole movie is questionable, like one of James's long spiralling sentences, full of commas, semicolons, and dashes--seemingly interminable. Bogdanovich...
...they violate expected sex roles: "A man may know every one, men are welcome to that privilege." The implication is that Daisy may certainly not know everyone, and Bogdanovich sets out to exploit the underlying sexual currents of this statement. One of the mysterious qualities of James's novella is the question of Winterbourne's motives. At the very beginning there are intimations of an illicit relationship between him and another woman never seen in the book. Then the narrative returns to the story at hand and we are led into Winterbourne's mind only enough to tantalize...
Bogdanovich is absolutely aware of how his faithfulness to the novella's dialogue makes the film slow-going. (To be fair, he's done an amazing job with James's ostentatious, overblown verbiage.) He knows how to tantalize in his own medium as much as James did in his through surprising cuts between scenes...
Henry James originally subtitled Daisy Miller as "A Study." Later on, in a 1909 preface to the novella he suppressed the subtitle, claiming it was mere poetic artifice. But he also wrote then that readers might have mistaken the subtitle for a literal epithet to his "poor little heroine's" name, characterized by flatness. "Flatness indeed," wrote James, "one must have felt, was the very sum of her story; so that perhaps after all the attached epithet was meant but as a deprecation, addressed to the reader, of any great critical hope of stirring scenes." If the film had used...