Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Fallaci, without doubt the single most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press. I saw her briefly on Nov. 2 and 4,1972, in my office. I did so largely out of vanity. She had interviewed leading personalities all over the world. Fame was sufficiently novel for me to be flattered by the company I would be keeping. I had not bothered to read her writings; her evisceration of other victims was thus unknown...
...universe; and both dwelt on despair as a source of grim comedy. But they were also set in a recognizable version of Maryland's Eastern Shore and populated with conventional characters. The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) changed course. An encyclopedic parody of 18th century English picaresque fiction, the novel was also a comic meditation on early colonial American history. From a few factual clues, Barth dreamed up a fancy as convoluted and funny as any in postwar American fiction...
...seventh novel, the first since Birds of America (1971), she has overflown her subject...
...might go further and say, as Roger Rosenblatt has suggested, that the book is hollow because Styron doesn't understand evil. Certainly, Styron wanted to write a book about evil; the ambition is palpable in the novel's heft. But I suspect it was an intellectual desire, not a visceral one, that it did not spring from a central concern in Styron's life. What kind of evil, after all, do you find on Martha's Vineyard? There are long sections of secondary history, and extensive quotations from people like Hannah Arendt, passages that seem tacked-on, contrived. The characters...
That's why the novel fails. The immediate temptation is to compare Styron to Conrad; Sophie is Polish, and there are even references, late in the novel, to Conrad's Lord Jim. Styron searches for good and evil, for the vestigia that demons leave, just as Conrad did; he may even be answering Saul Bellow's Nobel Laureate call for a return to Conrad, for a return to what Conrad called the "permanent, enduring, essential" in human existence. But Styron doesn't know "the horror." These are small shoes in the footprints of sasquatch...