Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Lolita. This is the story that taught a whole generation how to thank goodness for little girls. It also gave America's greatest mad scientist director, Stanley Kubrick, the chance to experiment with Nabokov's novel--and the result remains titillating. Some will argue that Sue Lyons was too old to play Nabokov's beguiling nymphet. But you have to know that those sunglasses and red lipstick and tight pants sum up the early 60s' teen angel. Others will tell you that James Mason's manners are too good to convey the sick depths of Humboldt Humboldt's jealousy...
...novel is strategically seeded with role reversals. Garp, raised on the campus of a New England boys' school where his mother is head nurse, exhibits strong maternal instincts. When his wife decides to have an affair, she behaves with all the distracting caution of the philandering commuter. The most striking sexual suspect is Roberta Muldoon, formerly Robert, a transsexual who once played tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles. She is Garp's closest friend and squash partner...
Final Payments, the best first novel in many months, begins at old Joe Moore's funeral. At the graveside are weeping priests. Mary Gordon knows the Irish Catholic enclaves of New York lethally well. The priests had been her father's companions, drinking for hours in his house and arguing about baptism of desire. Moore himself was a militant soldier of Christ and a right-wing fanatic: "His sympathies were with the South in the Civil War and the Spanish Fascists." But if his opinions were unfashionable and possibly barbaric, he knew something about the nature...
Mary Gordon is frightened about the money that she is making-$300,000 from the paperback sale, for example. "I deserve something, but not all that," she muses. She will take a trip to Spain, teach a course on the religious novel at Amherst next year, finish a new book and "look into causes that need help" if that money piles up too high. First, like Isabel after her liberation, she will buy some clothes at Bloomingdale...
...that it may actually be true. As for men, many of whom are still afflicted by a kind of sandbox nympholepsy-the women desired being a procession of "playmates"-more of them are now inclined to credit the experience of the Hungarian-born writer Stephen Vizinczey. In his 1965 novel, In Praise of Older Women, he wrote: "No girl, however intelligent and warmhearted, can possibly know or feel half as much at 20 as she will...