Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...back of the book jacket, a little mean perhaps, a little puffy from too much hard living, but secure, very secure, the security of reputation and seven-figure movie rights for Sophie's Choice. It is the Big Book, over 500 pages and therefore serious, Styron's first novel since he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for The Confessions of Nat Turner. Everyone wants to write a Big Book. Ask Norman Mailer...
...search of literary fame and fortune. He settles in a boarding house in Brooklyn, where he meets Nathan and Sophie, obsessive lovers, Olympic sexual athletes, and partners in mental disease. In its particulars, Sophie's Choice evokes Styron's own experience as a young writer struggling with hisfirst novel; in its overall scheme, it is Stingo's Bildungsroman, the story of a young man travelling north and discovering the nature of evil...
...pothole on the street made a clamor like the slamming of the gates of hell." These characters talk a lot, long bloated monologues that go on for pages. And there's at least one passage that has no place in a hardcover of any kind, much less a major novel...
Passion Play, however, can not claim an untarnished victory. Love never surfaces in this, or for that matter, any other Kosinski novel. Instead he confronts us with heroes like Fabian--men who want only to possess females; searing orgasm and the fulfillment of sexual fantasy develop as the closest bonds between humans...
Passion Play is Kosinski's seventh novel and we see more method to the madness of human grotesquerie that has always decorated his pages. Kosinski writes about the dark shadow self--our violent urges, homosexual lusts, transexual curiosities, murderous inclinations, heterosexual explorations, and, inevitably, our intense fear of surrendering control of the flesh and bones that give us life. None of these themes is new to Kosinski; what's new is the lucidity and restraint with which they're developed. Passion Play is his best novel...