Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...struts about in diamonds and furs for her first role as a mature woman in Heart Beat. The movie tells the story of the late Beat author Jack Kerouac and of Neal Cassady, a onetime car thief and the model for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's 1957 novel On the Road. Spacek plays Carolyn, a well-bred commercial artist who is married to Neal. To research the role, Spacek read a 1,400-page manuscript written by Carolyn and concluded that she was a well-educated, glamorous, "classy lady." Portraying her, reflects the new, womanly Spacek, is a challenge...
...LEGENDARY NOVEL...
...Once and Future King, and only two years ago, the late John Steinbeck's dull but competent retelling of Le Morte d'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory's 15th century compilation, was published. Now Thomas Berger offers still another rex redux, in the form of "a legendary novel." He might have done better to call it a haphazard parody...
...earlier novels, Berger proved himself a fine minor portraitist of the hapless, tough-talking American male: the middleclass, victimized hero of the Reinhart trilogy, the used-car salesmen and small-time gangsters in Sneaky People. Little Big Man, his burlesque epic of the wild West, and Who Is Teddy Villanova?, a brilliant imitation of the private-eye novel, displayed a notable talent for satire...
...claustrophobic family life could inspire brilliant satire. Whether they could inspire tragedy remained in doubt until Julia Markus addressed herself to the theme of growing up Jewish in Jersey City. Tragedy requires the decline of a hero, and Markus has invented one-however low key-in this somber, eloquent novel: Irving Bender, the son of East European Jews for whom the immigrant dream of success had come to nothing. "Irv's father drank and gambled and died," she writes in her terse idiom. "The mother got along; she got along. Education was life to his mother...