Word: novelled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sounds like a good book. Sounds like unconventional characters struggling to survive in a steadfastly conventional world. This is Marge Piercy's latest novel, Summer People...
Unfortunately, Piercy's novel fails to live up to its promising beginning. Her three main characters prove to be run-of-the-mill rather than unique. The married couple is Willie--a sculptor happy in his bigamous lifestyle, who refuses to wear anything fancier than jeans and a fishing sweater--and Susan, a fabric designer who lusts after the fashionable New York lifestyle of Tyrone, their wealthy neighbor across the pond...
Piercy chooses the easy--and uninteresting--way out of the conflicts she creates between her characters. Her supposedly unconventional protagonists select the most conventional of solutions. The novel would have been more interesting if Dinah had chosen not to take another lover, or if Piercy had established a more credible foundation for the relationship between Laurie and Jimmy...
Stories about seafaring inevitably carry a ballast of symbolism. Shimmering significance goes with the territory: people casting off in the little world of a ship, adrift on a journey at the mercies of the elements and fate. In his second novel -- twelve years after his critically praised An American Romance -- John Casey makes it plain on the opening page that some large issues are going to be entertained. He introduces his hero, Dick Pierce, in a skiff, floating among the creeks and inlets of coastal Rhode Island. In paragraph two, Pierce ponders the marsh grass around...
...breakup of colonialism and mass migrations. Of London in the 1950s he says, "I had found myself at the beginning of a great movement of peoples after the war, a great shaking up of the world, a great shaking up of old cultures and old ideas." In his new novel My Secret History, Paul Theroux offers an affectionate and accurate sketch of his friend and mentor. The character's name is S. Prasad, but the facts and mannerisms are V.S. Naipaul's: "He was an unusual alien: he knew everything about England, he had an Oxford degree, owned...