Word: novels
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Joyce Gary is an Irish-born and English-educated novelist whose work deserves to be more widely read than it is. Unlike so many of his contemporaries who mount the novel as if it were a rostrum, Cary works in the major tradition of English novel writing. He tells a vivid story, creates characters as credible as if they were stepping on one's toes, and uses the English language with beauty and wit. Why he is not therefore a favorite on this side of the Atlantic is something of a mystery...
Three years after Herself Surprised appeared in England, Cary published a sequel, The Horse's Mouth. The story of Gulley and Sara in their old age, it is a wonderfully comic and roisterous novel, tougher and more brilliant than Herself Surprised. Taken together, the two novels form one of the most impressive pieces of English writing in the past decade...
...latest novel, set in wartime Wall Street, Miss Stead shows all her old talents: her sure knowledge of financial intrigue, her talent for making distasteful characters come distastefully alive, and her needling, admirably unsentimental prose. Yet A Little Tea, a Little Chat is no pleasure to read...
...away from them. By ruthlessly eliminating any suggestion of decency or honor in her money-crazed and lecherous characters, Miss Stead deprives herself of all possibilities for moral contrasts and dramatic conflicts; the total absence of white makes it impossible to recognize the black in the dark. The novel soon assumes the quality of a very shrill feminine nightmare...
...Crusaders is a novel with a theme: that there was a tangible connection between the cost of the war and the uncertainty in American war aims. It is less a war novel, in the sense that The Naked and the Dead is one, than it is one of those old-fashioned cycloramas like the Battle of Gettysburg, in which every part of the action and the features of every officer were painted...