Word: novelled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...little sense, or at best seems irrelevant. You're not really sure how the plot is going to wind up. The only difference is that with a film the projector usually gets repaired and you can resolve the questions you have. But with The Boys and Their Baby, the novel ends and you're still waiting for more. Five days after you finish it you're still waiting to tie the strings. But the loose ends persist...
...novel, in fact, the only significant things that have happened are that Adam's mother has come to visit, he has been stabbed, in the middle of masturbating, by Christopher's mother who returns in the middle of the night to reclaim her son, and Christopher takes a step at the end of the novel. We know that Adam will continue in San Francisco for at least the rest of the year. But the rest is uncertain...
DeLillo reconstructs an Oswald and a series of events from the 26 volumes of the Warren Report. Because this is fiction, the outlines of Oswald and of the events are clear. Everything in the novel has a hard factual edge. Everything sounds reported, even what must be pure speculation. When the characters descend into dialect or private associations, DeLillo often lets his narrative voice accompany them, but this is not a relaxation of his distant, researched style. The diction or the sentence structure may change, but the tone never slips; DeLillo remains detached...
...many students of literature, Molly Bloom, the heroine of James Joyce's Ulysses, is the greatest character in what may be the greatest novel of the English language. Wife, mother, performer, realist, Earth figure, whore, Molly was to Joyce what the Greek Penelope was to Homer--all that was embodied in the female gender...
...Hill's novel also features subterranean action, in coal shafts both employed and abandoned. He blends earnest depiction of working-class culture, subtle glimpses of the corrosive effect of crime on victims and perpetrators, a doomed romance between a miner and a police official's college teacher wife, a series of comic set pieces starring the official's bullying superior, and a whole slew of secrets unwisely unearthed. The daring mingling of genres works rather better than the cluttered plot. Most memorable are the scenes of the central character, a wilder version of the bright boy who is the schoolteacher...