Word: prose
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Leavis, 82, grand panjandrum of British literary criticism; in Cambridge, England. As a young instructor at Cambridge University, Leavis scandalized his colleagues by daring to lecture on D.H. Lawrence. His reputation grew with the founding in 1932 of Scrutiny, a literary quarterly that measured stringently the moral quality of prose and dismissed both Joyce and Auden for their modernism. An enormously influential figure, he fought his last great battle against C.P. Snow, whom he called "portentously ignorant" for urging the literary world to recognize science...
...Blond Baboon by Janwillem van de Wetering (Houghton Mifflin; $7.95). The Dutch-born author, 47, who has sojourned in many exotic places and once lived in a Buddhist monastery in Japan, now inhabits Maine and writes cleaner English prose than many a Yankee aspirant. However, his stories are still set, with occasional departures (The Japanese Corpse), in Amsterdam, where his sleuths have taken over the turf once occupied by Nicolas Freeling's late, lamented Inspector Van der Valk. Van de Wetering's latest Dutch treat, starring the familiar trio of Detectives Grijpstra and de Gier and their commissaris...
Author John H. Davis has discovered in the Guggenheims his own rich vein of biography; his book fails only in the leaden prose. But Davis' unerring eye for anecdotes surmounts most stylistic obstacles and makes The Guggenheims a consistently fascinating saga...
Ruth Whitman, intermingling poetry and prose, tells Tamsen Donner's personal story, and creates a secular epic at the same time. The Donner party strikes out for California in 1846 for "fun" and meets tragedy. The end is not sudden, but is the slow unloading of the baggage of the old life. "George lifts my heavy crate of Shakespeare... and hides it in a hill of salt," and the old identity...
...possessing a dose of profundity. Yet Greene's is a worldly wisdom that is never fully-earned. It is a posture of knowing pessimism that we are expected to take as an a priori supposition, and which Greene keeps us from questioning too deeply with his fleeting, almost cinematic prose; he gives a whiff of a deep thought and then moves quickly to another scene, another shot, before we have time to look for the source of the scent. In the place of any real character development. Greene peppers his narrative with the kind of jaded aphorisms that sound wise...