Word: novelness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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It’s fitting, then, that this novel so sensitive to the memory of past works finds substance in a tale of objects illuminated by the memories they evoke. “Museum of Innocence” may lack the tight construction of predecessors like “My Name Is Red,” but Kemal’s frustrated recollections resonate more intimately than anything Pamuk has written before...
...what if Prospero is a deceiver? A usurper? A false sovereign, like Macbeth? Philip Roth’s latest novel, “The Humbling,” suggests the synthesis of these two roles in the book’s protagonist: the aging, once-great stage actor Simon Axler. “He’d lost his magic. The impulse was spent. He’d never failed in the theater, everything he had done had been strong and successful, and then the terrible thing had happened: he couldn’t act,” it begins...
These days, Roth is about as prolific as he is grim. His most recent novels have all dealt in almost expository detail with the subject of death and its inextricability from the spectrum of human experience. “The Humbling,” with its three-act structure and its otherwise bare narrative that alternates predominantly between dialogue with Axler and his inner-monologue, could essentially serve as an allegory for Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. The entirety of the novel, from Axler’s time...
...season, full of certainty and a sense of singularity, and leading to every unforeseeable contingency.” For Axler, this consummate performance, this total surrender of the self in the acknowledgement of the world’s pervasive spectacle, is an act of transcendence. Within the novel, however, it reads more simply; as desperate, as derivative, as meaningless. This is the book Roth has delivered: the rules don’t just prevent you from winning; they prevent you from even playing...
Even the transgressive sexual dynamic that takes hold of the final chapter is hemmed in by the novel’s overtly intellectualized conceit. Pegeen’s reversion from lesbianism, rather than providing the sufficiently developed emotional component that would complicate the novel in an engaging way, merely serves to mix and match psychoanalytic tropes through progressively convoluted and prop-oriented sexual encounters. She becomes a symbol for Axler’s diminished potency, literally wearing a symbol of phallic power during their lovemaking, and his realization of that fact does little more than render it explicit...