Word: novels
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...hero of the new novel, Willie Chandran, spent most of Half a Life being another of Naipaul's "mimic men"?his term for a person from a former European colony (India, in this case) who has grown up without knowing how to live, except by aping his erstwhile rulers. Willie has done one smart thing early in life: he escaped from India and landed in London?for Naipaul, the center of civilization, and the best place on earth to make a real man of yourself, which is the goal toward which he urges all his fictional characters. Willie, alas, keeps...
...courses’ reading lists are inflated—taking a regular course load implies upwards of a few hundred pages of reading a week, and part of our self-definition and pride as overachieving students stems from our ability to plough through an entire Henry James novel or Freud treatise in one night. Occasionally professors admit that we are not really expected to read all of the material; and some teaching fellows suggest that the trick is to read one part of the assignment very carefully, and skim the rest. But the assignments remain, and as we rush through...
Jelinek, 57, swims in controversy. Her novels (Women as Lovers) and film scripts (Malina) are searingly personal and political. She writes plays scourging Austria's far-right Freedom Party and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Jelinek was little-known abroad until now; in one day, sales of her novel The Piano Teacher jumped a million slots on Amazon.com into the top 10. That's one Jelinek story with a happy ending. --By Richard Corliss
...THINKING OF MAKING ON THE ROAD A vast story of those I know," Jack Kerouac confided to his journals, "as well as a study of rain and rivers." Rain and rivers--why not? For his hyperkinetic, endearing, exasperating 1957 novel, Kerouac tried to admit whole worlds. An account of a few pinwheeling characters in perpetual cross-country motion, it had room to spare for rivers, landscapes, starry skies, Benzedrine addicts, endless marathons of driving and lots of fast-talking madmen. "Because the only people for me are the mad ones," Kerouac's narrator, Sal Paradise, tells us. "The ones...
...icon of hip. But that's not the man you meet in Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954 (Viking; 371 pages), a poignant selection of Kerouac's diaries edited by the historian Douglas Brinkley. The journals begin with Kerouac at 25, anguishing over his first novel, The Town and the City ("Why doesn't God appear to me to tell me I'm on the right track?"). They follow him through travels he made for On the Road, "hurt and haunted by hurt." The quintessential hipster turns out to be a guy whose hallmarks are tenderness, bewilderment...