Word: novels
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...other characters in “A Gate at the Stairs” initially seem flat—they are colorful, but the reader is never given enough information to theorize about their motives. An epiphany concerning Tassie’s employers near the end of the novel explains some of their actions, but it ultimately reveals more contradictions than solutions to the mystery of their behavior. In the hands of a writer less observant of human nature, the enigmatic behavior of the supporting characters would rob the novel of its internal consistency. But Tassie’s observations...
...Believer, Moore claimed that “awkwardness is where the tension is, and tension is where the story is.” If that is the case, story permeates every word of spoken dialogue in this book; dialogue that never seems to reflect what the characters mean. The novel is fraught with moments in which characters don’t quite seem to be responding to what actually has been said, creating a symphony of crossed wires...
...these picturesque, slightly kitschy touches still don’t quite succeed in distracting from the work’s insubstantiality. “A novel in fragments” may be the phrase of choice in the marketing materials, but the truth is that “Laura” is hardly more than an assemblage of disconnected scribblings; reading diligently, one can get through the entire thing in under an hour. The difference in quality between this and Nabokov’s other works, too, is painfully clear. However much Nabokov’s other posthumously published work...
...posthumous publication of Nabokov’s uncompleted last novel “The Original of Laura” thus comes as an uneasy blessing. There are characteristic moments of stylistic brilliance, but admiring them is a bit like calling attention to the gilt cornices of a house left lacking a door. Roughly the first half of the book is devoted to Flora, a grown Lolita-type, bored with her marriage to a psychologist named Philip Wild and carrying out numerous affairs. Meanwhile, an obsessive former flame is writing an erotic novel about her titled “My Laura...
However, there are certainly aspects of this new development that deserve praise. The mailings provide colleges with a novel new form of advertising, exposing students to institutions they might have otherwise ignored. Bright students might discover that great universities are not found only on the front page of U.S. News and World Report; as a result, lesser-known schools could attract more intellectually gifted students who might otherwise base college decisions on name recognition alone. Similarly, waiving the application fee attracts students who find the cost of applying to college prohibitively high, which increases the accessibility of higher education...