Word: novelled
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...HIGH ROAD by Edna O'Brien (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $18.95). The Irish author made her reputation writing about headstrong girls dashing toward the flame of maturity; her tenth novel portrays women who have come out on the other side, badly burned...
DICTIONARY OF THE KHAZARS: A LEXICON NOVEL by Milorad Pavic...
...novel is an enveloping glimpse into the soul of a teenaged boy baffled by the effects of death on his mind and world. McElroy's drifting, almost careless stream of consciousness adds credence to his hero's words. The reader is drawn into the boy's mind, and follows his leaps from bemusement to reminiscence to stark realization of death's actuality. What began as an elegy for the father develops into a journal documenting the son's progression into maturity even as the letter progresses into wider and wider circles of society...
McElroy's achievement is to move beyond elegy, which is the conventiopnal stance of books about the death of loved ones. Just as the letter ends up by cerating a distance between the boy and his father, as written words are want to do, so too an elegaic novel would only add to that distance...
...process which lies at the heart of any father-son relationship. That process, perhaps more painful and certainly less conventionally eloquent than simple elegy, enables one to cope with the death of a parent, McElroy suggests. It also forms the basis for a well-crafted and instructive novel...