Word: novels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Carter Administration has come up with a novel justification for its planned $61 billion federal budget deficit. It is necessary, officials argue, in part because Uncle Sam should put back into the economy money that states and cities are draining away by running big budget surpluses. The argument is more than a little questionable because these surpluses will not restrain the economy but will spur it by making possible state and local tax cuts and more spending on services. But there is no denying the basic fact: most state and municipal treasuries are indeed flush with more cash than they...
...Dunn's succession of one-night lovers. Tuesday Weld provides an unmemorable contrast to Keaton as Dunn's capricious older sister Katherine, relying too heavily on the character's caricaturish whackiness to carry her through the part. Richard Brooks' direction and adaptation of Judith Rossner's best-selling novel is sufficiently slick to draw crowds to the box office, but the film can be filed as another victim to the typical super-ficiality of American movies. Sharp witticisms and flashy techniques keep the movie's pace upbeat, while Brooks neglects Dunn's broader significance as prototypical single woman vainly coping...
...protagonist of Greene's latest novel, The Human Factor, doesn't even have the long-lost piety to hang on to. He still sneaks into an occasional church (he's an ex-Protestant, not Catholic), and tries to summon up guilt and contrition, but somehow nothing happens. What Maurice Castle, middle-echelon British intelligence officer, near retirement age and with jurisdiction over Africa, lives for is security and peace of mind. All Castle really treasures is his routine, his two double whiskies before dinner, his comfortable house in the town outside London where he grew up, and his family. This...
...cynics, the novelist usually does try to convince us that under their hard shells his anti-heroes really do want desperately to believe. If not in politics or in love, (at least not for long), then in religion and the afterlife. The place they perpetually go in Greene's novels to quaff their spiritual thirst is the Catholic Church; and if their inability to take God seriously keeps them from having faith, at least they can while away their time feeling guilty. The most successful portrait Greene paints of this inward struggle for piety is in The Power...
Needless to say, Castle's decision tugs at our sympathy, and several reviewers have speculated that Greene means through this novel to justify in a roundabout way the defection in the '60s of his good friend, Kim Philby. But if we take Castle's side, it is largely because the British superiors he defies in the book come off as such cardboard villains. "Uncle Remus," conceivable even now, is done here too baldly to be believed. It is also a bit much that the heads of British intelligence meet over lunch and after shooting parties, to discuss plans for liquidation...