Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Even with its too-glib identification of mental maturity with success and conformity, the movie is as good as the novel. Gene Kelly sings and dances too well to be a convincing second-rater, but he gives an agile performance as the camp entertainment director. As schmalzy Uncle Samson, Ed Wynn gets a few laughs, and Claire Trevor is sharp and clear as the irritating but well-meaning mother. Natalie Wood, a great beauty, is something less than a great actress. Her most believable moment comes when Marjorie, despairing of Broadway acting fame, says mechanically: "Sometimes I think...
...find an exciting new sense of vocation. A violin note spins out over the hushed audience, "thin and glittering like a gold thread in sunlight . . . the echo felt like a kind of weeping in one's chest. A weeping that could not be wept." At novel's end, with a profound sense of release shared by boy and reader alike, the boy is ready to abandon his grey world of failing sight for the luminous realm of pure sound...
Novelist John Wain, 33, is identified by his British critics and his U.S. publisher as one of the Angry Young Men, but his second novel to cross the Atlantic does not look back in anger. It is a lively, funny story, essentially an American-style narrative about how men make good in a bad way in the big city and learn that success in the end is nothing but dust and ashes...
...publishers describe The Contenders as "a novel of character," and there they are right. The narrator is a beer-pudgy reporter, a jovial, middle-aging man named Joe Shaw. His real name is Clarence, but he is "everybody's uncle" and therefore Joe. Self-described as "an uncouth provincial boor," he tells a tale of a pair of modern Dick Whittingtons who see London as "the pallid aviary of bank notes flapping their wings in time to the cunning chimes of Big Ben." The London-lured travelers are school friends who grew up together in a town where...
Miss Jackson carries off all this in a cool manner: the irony manner gets out of hand. If the novel, a short one by all odds, seems at times on the long side, this is because she is carefully shading her characters and needs space to do so. The book doesn't seem to have any compelling or original themes that have not popped up in high-class escape writing before; but as a tightly and incisively constructed piece, worthy of a goodly bit of concentration, it rates very well indeed...