Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...anyone born after World War I, Ruth Suckow's new novel may seem no more contemporary than an old-fashioned Sunday sermon, no closer to modern literature than Horatio Alger. It may be hard to believe that she was once praised as a realist, and that so joyous a literary scalper as Henry Louis Mencken cheered her on and gave her houseroom in his American Mercury. The fact is, Author Suckow has not changed at all, but life has. The Iowa that was her childhood home is still the source of her fictional truth. In The John Wood Case...
...society in which the Bible was a fact of life, in which an austere Sunday dinner was eaten in the presence of a blackboard which bore "discussion themes" for the children's conversation-"Honor," "Temperance," "Reverence." It is worth skipping literary graces and the sensations of the contemporary novel to see how things were then...
Childhood, at any rate, is alien to whatever divides and envenoms mankind. In this slender, sensitively wrought novel, Vera Panova has skillfully mirrored the child's healing universality...
...life goes on, Serioja's mother remarries. The stepfather is a kindly sort (he is a collective-farm manager, though the novel is otherwise as apolitical as spring rain) who promises Serioja a shiny bicycle with a red lamp and silver bell. It is the boy's first love affair. There is the thrill of anticipation, the rapture of possession, satiety, neglect, then utter boredom as the bike rusts untouched in a kitchen corner. A new baby brother is expected, but the death of great-grandmother is more awesome. With compassionate wisdom, the stepfather assures the shaken...
Author Panova shares Boris Pasternak's poetic affection for the Russian land. Serioja races across "black velvet ploughland" or watches the white-snow cling like "fat white caterpillars on the branches of the trees." Toward novel's end, the boy tastes bitter desolation when his stepfather is assigned a new post, and it appears that Serioja's health may force the family to leave him behind. At the last moment, seeing that parting will destroy the child, the stepfather scoops him up in a happy ending that is movingly true to the essential spirit of the book...