Word: novels
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...Caine Mutiny Court-Marshal This revival prompts a question: Herman Wouk, what were you thinking? In the context of his great sea saga - published as a novel in 1951 and turned into a 1954 film, then this play - the court-marshal of the psycho Captain Queeg is a demonstration of what happens when real-world wartime chaos gets translated into the cool legal niceties of the courtroom. But unmoored from its seagoing prologue, all that talk about Queeg's obsession with shirttails and strawberries lacks any dramatic punch. And why make so much of the betrayal of Lt. Keefer...
Sittenfeld's first novel, Prep, was the sleeper hit of 2005. It tells the bittersweet, perfectly observed story about Lee, a quiet Midwestern girl who tries, with decidedly mixed results, to fit in at a breathtakingly preppy Eastern private school. To the surprise of many, not least its publisher and its author, Prep spent nine weeks on the New York Times best-seller list...
...barely 1 1/2 years later, Sittenfeld, 30, has a new novel, The Man of My Dreams (Random House; 272 pages). If you're wondering how she managed to produce it so rapidly, it turns out she wrote most of Man of My Dreams at the same time as Prep--"There came this point where it was almost like dating two different people," she says. There's certainly a sibling resemblance between the two novels. Sittenfeld's new heroine is a rather strange girl named Hannah: thoughtful, withdrawn, a little out of synch with the world around her. Like...
...When the novel begins, Hannah is 14 and bearing silent witness to the demolition of her parents' marriage while cautiously exploring the notion of romance herself. From this vivid little home movie, the book spins forward, light-footed, catching Hannah on a disastrous college road trip, falling for her trampy cousin's boyfriend, having her first kiss at the advanced age of 21. Where Prep was about love and social class, Man of My Dreams is very much a book about love, love, love, but Sittenfeld shows us that there is still something fresh to say about the oldest subject...
...Beloved won with 15 votes; DeLillo's Underworld got the silver medal with 11. Also among the top vote-getters was Philip Roth's American Pastoral (7 votes), Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (8 votes) and John Updike's Rabbit quadrilogy (also 8 votes, from judges using the term "novel" with gymnastic flexibility.) You are hereby saved the trouble of reading all those other, lesser works from the past 25 years - that's service journalism! I just wish they'd done it American Idol style, with Morrison et al. reading a chapter a week on live television and Michiko Kakutani...