Word: novels
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Crowninshield saga was bound to suggest a novel to somebody, some day. The Running of the Tide, by Esther Forbes (Book-of-the-Month for October and winner of one of the 1947 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer $150,000 novel contests...
...characters, the poetic prose that on re-examination turns out to be well-nigh meaningless. Its failure is so complete in this respect that it may be that Sandburg's greatest service to American literature will be to have ended this sort of imaginative effort-"the great American novel"-once...
Before the war, Irwin Shaw won easy fame and money by turning out smooth and clever plays and stories-for many tastes, rather too smooth and clever. Now, with his war experience to draw upon, Shaw has thrown all his energy and talent into an ambitious novel. As one of the Broadway characters of a Shaw story might say, this is his "big pitch." The sad news is that he has failed; his novel is depressing evidence of how hard it is for a writer to slough off youthful habits...
Shaw's novel has three interweaving plots. Christian Diestl is an Austrian would-be superman who tolerates his Nazi party comrades since they are useful for world conquest; Michael Whitacre is a Broadway character worried about the sordid emptiness of his life; Noah Ackerman is a young Jewish boy confused by modern life but determined to burst through to personal fulfillment...
...trouble with The Young Lions is that, though Shaw has planned a large narrative structure, his novel often crumbles into unintegrated sketches. Many of these are good, especially at suggesting the drab atmospheres of Army camps, but many others become preachy and dreadfully sentimental. What is worst about his writing is that he has uncertain taste; he never knows when to stop. He begins with a moving description of Noah's pain at coming across anti-Semitism in the army and then collapses into a completely incredible bit of hocus-pocus in which Noah fights ten big soldiers...