Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...interviewing those paid to care for the elderly, introduces her to many new people. But in an already cluttered, lengthy novel, this endless procession of new characters does little more than add confusion and tedium. Even Isabel's closest friends--Eleanor, a flighty sensualist, and Liz, a strong-willed lesbian--are not terribly interesting until they are forced to confront each other...
...novel in which the heroine is supposed to be liberating herself, Final Payments is surprisingly sexist. Having never freed herself from the outdated dreams of her solitary years, Isabel flings herself at almost any man. Her father always was the "strong...
Especially in the middle of the novel, Gordon's prose--saturated with adjectives; empty, if not revolting characters; and lurid sexual details--reads like something out of Mademoiselle or Ladies' Home Journal (in both she has published short stories). but when Margaret, Isabel's old housekeeper, reappears towards the end, the writing tightens up again. Margaret practically embodies that stubborn, un-American subculture, which the author seems to identify with Catholicism. Even if Final Payments lacks a clear message and Mary Gordon's language often crumples under the weight of her cliches, at least one gets the sense...
...outside his country. The subjects-time warps, prison-camp life, child murder-left audiences pining for the heraldic posturing more familiar to opera. "Atrocious drama," huffed one New York critic after a 1931 performance of From the House of the Dead, a powerful musical rendering of Dostoevsky's novel...
...look much like a straight shooter, but Barbara Bach is playing a tough-minded Yugoslav partisan about to help some British soldiers blow up a bridge. The film: Force 10 from Navarone, based on a novel by Alistair MacLean. Says Bach: "I enjoyed being the only woman among all those simpatici men." So simpatica was Bach that the screenwriter built up her role. In fact, Author MacLean, on a visit to the set, showed some surprise that his movie had a female lead...