Word: novels
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Browse through any bookstore's graphic novel section and it will look like a tsunami has passed through, blasting the shelves with reams of indistinguishable Japanese manga. Like a red tide, most of it stinks. But some interesting manga flotsam has also washed ashore, strangely, by way of France, Spain and England. Since 2003 a Spanish publisher, Ponent Mon, in collaboration with a U.K. outfit named Fanfare, has published five books in the U.S. as part of a line they call nouvelle manga. They mean to start a new genre and the latest two, "Doing Time" by Kazuichi Hanawa...
...novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 676 pages), Wolfe has set himself the challenge of chronicling youthful hedonism on a college campus. But at 73, can Wolfe party with the frat boys? Or has America finally outrun its most tireless chronicler...
Wolfe's previous novel, A Man in Full, published in 1998, took him 11 long years to finish, and when he was finally through, he wasted no time looking around for fresh territory. He likes to portray himself as a literary opportunist: in his 1989 manifesto "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast," he scolded American novelists for writing minimalist, self-conscious little books when there's so much rich, strange, documentary material out there. "They don't want to see the world," he has said, "they want to suck their thumbs." After A Man in Full, it occurred to Wolfe...
...Charlotte Simmons isn't like Wolfe's other novels. For one thing, he sticks largely to one setting, the Dupont campus--he's not doing his city-hopping, class-transcending billion-footed-beast act, which is impressive but gave his earlier books a certain overstuffed lumpiness. Charlotte Simmons adheres more to the Aristotelian unities--time, place and action--and thus hangs together more neatly. It's a much more personal novel than the earlier ones. Not unlike Wolfe, Charlotte is a permanent outsider, a lonely observer. Wolfe's books are usually more about setting than character, but Charlotte's delicately...
...these nits, once picked, should be discarded and forgotten. What remains is a rich, wise, absorbing and irresistible novel. Wolfe does things with words--exhilarating, intoxicating, impossible things--that no other writer can do. Take this example, from the second page of the book, in which frat boy Hoyt stares at himself in the mirror, dead drunk: "A gale was blowing in his head. He liked it. He bared his teeth. He had never seen them quite this way before. So even! So white! They vibrated from perfection. And his square jaw ... that chin with the perfect cleft...