Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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British Novelist Nevil Shute, 59, who moved out to Australia in 1950, was back in London to stimulate sales of a new novel, see old friends, change a few attitudes. Five years ago, In the Wet set him up, after a long career in fiction, as the empire's most promising angry middle-aged man. Jumping 30 years into the future, Shute's 17th novel described a commonwealth of flourishing dominions (where citizens' merits could earn them extra votes) fettered by a mired-in-Socialism United Kingdom that approximates "a home for incurables." A tired, aging Queen...
...past Eliot seems to have agreed with Sartre that hell is other people; now he introduces the novel idea (for him) that heaven may be other people too. For this beaming Mr. Eliot, British critics had mostly middle-drawer adjectives-"entertaining," "touching," "his most human"-while the London Observer's Kenneth Tynan crashed through with "banal." U.S. audiences may have a chance to judge for themselves before long. The play is scheduled to move to London later this month, but at week's end Producer Henry Sherek was mulling "most flattering offers" to transport The Elder Statesman direct...
...indestructible, scallawaggish ex-Mayor James Michael Curley, 83, who claims in tones of delighted outrage that he is the model of the indestructible, scallawaggish politico in The Last Hurrah, caused hurrahs among movie pressagents and headline writers: he filed for an injunction against the Boston showing of the novel's movie version. Court hearing has been set for this week, but chances are slim that Boston, or any other place, will be deprived of seeing the Boss's adventures as portrayed by Spencer Tracy...
This phrase keynotes the bright dialogue of this bright new novel. What is a Jumble? The term is a kind of Joycean jive for Johnbull, blurred by soft voices and subtle minds to a new sound. The word is used by London's fast-growing population of West Indian and African Negroes. In their eyes, the whites whose town they have invaded are confused and confusing, square as tea chests, Jumbled in their thoughts about Spades. And Spades, of course, are the Negroes as they describe themselves-hip in their bright night world, realistically calling a spade a spade...
Kingdom by the Sea. The novel's European narrator calls himself Humbert Humbert and the doubletalk name sets the note of self-mockery that runs-laughter questioning the validity even of despair-throughout the book. Humbert's ignominious, fatal obsession is for little girls in the 9-14 bracket-not ordinary little girls but a special kind he calls "nymphets." As Humbert explains it in a passage that is typical of his style: "You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins...