Word: novelled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...thus given many perspectives on the characters, as they talk about themselves and are talked about by several different people. But one of the primary difficulties with the novel is that the accounts don't match. When Fanny talks, she does not seem like the same Fanny about which Suwelo talks. Not even like a Fanny whom Suwelo misunderstands...
PART of the problem is that the characters serve only as mouthpieces for Walker's ideas. They never develop any personality of their own. The novel is written as long strings of storytelling by the characters. but they all take the same tone and they all deliver the same, or at least complementary, messages. Walker called the book a "wisdom tale" and it is indeed didactic, at the expense of character...
...which makes David Shields' heavy-handed, almost clinical exploration of these inevitable limitations somewhat disappointing. The premise of Shields' Dead Languages--assuming a novel can or should have a premise--is that "language...takes you where it wants to go, which may not be into life," and that "all languages--when they are used as masks, as hiding places for the feelings of the heart--are dead...
...many ways, this novel is more a chronicle of the family than of Jeremy's childhood. But all the characters are flat and do nothing for the work's landscape. Jeremy's mother is unbelievably callous. She is a well-known, talented journalist who carries her notebook with her everywhere and sees a feature article in every crisis in her son's life...
...introduction to a 1965 reissue of Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children, the poet and critic Randall Jarrell defined a novel as "a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it." Stead's celebrated book was indeed lengthy and imperfect. But it had at its center an unforgettable father figure whose weakness and tyrannical urges were disguised by forced jollity. Francis Clemmons, the dear old dad of Joan Chase's lyric second novel (her first, During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, won PEN's Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award in 1984), also...