Word: novelled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...neither should we think that Tyler's vision is limited simply because her novels' settings often are. Her aim is not to depict perfectly the manners of middle class marriage. Instead, Tyler is trying to make sense of love--how the hope of love can transform a life and the lack of it can ruin one. And she treats the topic seriously, realizing that we concern ourselves too much with it, that we cannot live without it and that for some it can be the focus of a lifetime. Maggie Moran in Breathing Lessons is one of those people...
...everything. Jesse's marriage to one of his groupies, Fiona, ended in divorce. But they had a daughter, named Leroy. During the time when Jesse's family were part of Maggie's life, they were everything to her. And when Fiona and Leroy fled, seven years before the novel opens, Maggie was left with an abandonment she cannot forget and a rift she is determined to mend...
...central conflict in the novel is between Maggie's efforts to force her version of happiness on her family and their resistance to her interfering. Maggie fools Jesse and Fiona into meeting again. As usual, Maggie paints things as she would like them to be rather than as they are. She expects others to accept her fantasy. Tyler continually impresses on us that Maggie's gratification lies in the possibility of re-uniting Jesse and Fiona, somehow giving them what she feels that they, and indirectly Maggie herself, deserve...
Talent cannot be forced. A writer who plans to write the Great American Novel usually produces drivel. A quarterback who plans to carry his team on his shoulders usually finds he cannot move...
...subject of twin gynecologists, driven to dementia and a symbiotic murder-suicide by urges that both share but neither understands, seems a scenario only Cronenberg could dream up. In fact, the story comes from the novel Twins, by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland, which in turn was based on the case history of Drs. Cyril and Stewart Marcus, a pair of respected gynecologists who in 1975 were found dead in a Manhattan apartment. From these threads Cronenberg has spun a fantasia of split personality and the vulnerable male ego. The film's identical twins, Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played...