Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Albert Guerard has served up an omelette of Francophilia--and as a critical handbook on the limitations of his adopted style, his newest novel has a certain merit...
...Barrister Sir Raymond Bastable, owner of the hat and an "overbearing dishpot," who assumes that the David behind the slingshot is a youthful delinquent, and is inspired to write (anonymously) a bitter exposure of British youth in the form of a novel named Cocktail Time...
Author Guerard (The Hunted, Maquisard), 43, is a Texas-born Francophile who is currently professor of English at Harvard. He writes with a Gallic coolness and clarity, and with the sure French eye for the inhuman qualities of the human condition. This novel, his fifth, has both wit and wisdom, but his major characters are fated to sound like literary echoes: charming as Christiane is, she has been met before more charmingly in the pages of Colette; Anthony, in his bedridden sloth, his antisocial despairs, his wounded intellectual cries, has slouched through a long line of novels ranging from Ivan...
...Realists. Madame Sarraute, the Russian-born wife of a Paris lawyer, has been acclaimed a leader of a group called the New Realists, who urge a new kind of objectivity, which is at once both more detached and more intense. "In this future universe of the novel," says Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, the group's titular leader, "gestures and objects will be 'there,' before being 'something'; and they will still be there afterwards, hard, unalterable, eternally present, mocking their own meaning . . . No longer will objects be merely vague reflections of the hero's vague...
...some point of adolescence, every schoolboy falls distantly in love with an actress. Few do as complete a job as Anthony, the downbeat narrator of this new novel, who carries the torch for his actress over a stretch of 18 years and then, lamentably, achieves gratification...