Word: prose
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...plan that aims at a radical simplification of the Internal Revenue Code, Ronald Reagan's tax reform seems remarkably complex. To explain it, the Treasury last week issued a paperback volume of 461 pages studded with charts and at times singularly opaque prose. Sample: "A customer of a contractor making progress payments or advance payments would be treated as self- constructing the property under construction by the contractor to the extent of such payments...
Unlike Marquez, whose numerous stories set in Columbia during the near-civil war of the early 1950's are written in a terse style, quite unlike the expensive prose of One Hundred Years of Solitude and other more recent works, Allende shows that writing about politics need not mean abandoning the enchanting style which has put such writers as Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, and Marie Vargas Llosa in a class of their...
...writing like this, writing which contents the social and political issues so important to the people of Latin America squarely without becoming potential or losing its special beauty, which distinguished Isabel Allende and The House of the Sports from authors like Marquez who have maintained a barrier between their prose and their politics. By breaking the barrier. Allende has produced a novel important for both is timing and its grace...
This attack is somewhat ironic coming from Epstein, a professor at Northwestern University and editor of The American Scholar (the voice of Phi Beta Kappa), but Epstein's prose is refreshingly free of academic cant. In fact, he attempts to puncture the diseased, pseudo-critical language he calls "blurbissimo"--swollen with hyperbolic vacuity and written more or advertisements than reviews...
...today's readers--Epstein inexplicably ignores such Southern writers as Eudora Welty. Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy, whose works he ought to enjoy--readers who share his prejudices will laugh and cheer as he lays waste the bad guys. Even for those who don't. Epstein's prose reaches the level of artistry, and should be appreciated as such--as a thing well-made...