Word: novels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Gore Vidal cannot wait. His latest novel is an apocalyptical extravaganza that craftily combines feminism, homosexuality, mysticism, science fiction, fiction science, the second law of thermodynamics, the first law of survival, high fashion and low animal cunning. The plot is diabolically clever. Theodora (Teddy) Ottinger, the world's leading female pilot and bisexual author of the bestselling Beyond Motherhood, stumbles into the service of Jim Kelly, a golden-haired Viet Nam vet who fancies himself Kalki, the Hindu god whose job it is to ring down the curtain on the material universe. Teddy needs the money; she is behind...
...novel's narrator, Teddy Ottinger, records the final months of her species in the White House, where the five "Perfect Masters" have established themselves in an elegant hell: "The logistics of survival in a dead world," she says, "are complex and, thank God, distracting...
...portrait of a national illusion, or rather, of national disillusion. The closer America moved toward that disillusionment, the farther away its people grew from themselves, running about and seemingly never exerting even a modicum of control over their own lives. America of this period is well suited for a novel or play that examines that superficiality and gets at the pain lying beneath it. But Manulis's U.S.A. omits far too much of what transpires beneath the surface. What remains after the newsreel and strung together character collages is a superficial play about superficial people...
Turow acknowledges this criticism, but disagrees. Sort of. "A lot of my classmates think I did exaggerate the grade competitiveness. My own response is that I think there's poetic truth in One L"--not bad, for a book Turow himself deems too flat and stereotyped to call a novel. "People claim not be as conscious of grades, not to feel those pressures. My own sense is that I really got to the genie of Harvard Law School. The genius. The germ...
Turow says a need to succeed makes him particularly vulnerable to a false god, ambition. "I spent four of my five years at Stanford writing a novel I was unable to sell," he recounts. "I found it an intense, in many ways devastating, experience. A very serious book. Very polished. I still read the prose with great pleasure. I came here feeling that, for whatever reasons, I'd failed as a writer, so I wanted to do something well. I wanted to start in a new field and feel successful with it." The hallmark of doing something well, he adds...