Word: prose
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that he famously refuses to finish. To be sure, Brodkey's short fiction has occasionally appeared in magazines over the intervening decades. But it is his lonely struggle to produce a big book that has impressed some pretty influential folks. Yale professor Harold Bloom calls Brodkey "unparalleled in American prose fiction since the death of William Faulkner." Susan Sontag says Brodkey is "going for real stakes. I read every word he writes." The author, who lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side, has sometimes been willing to join the chorus of his admirers: "It's dangerous to be as good...
...Yorker.) For page after page a Harvard undergraduate named Wiley tries to bring his stubbornly unresponsive girlfriend to orgasm: "The whitish bubbling, the splash of her discontinuous physical response: those waves, ah, that wake rose, curled outward, bubbled, and fell. Rose, curled outward, bubbled, and fell." Little in this prose marathon is particularly erotic or offensive; it is possible for long periods of time to forget entirely what is supposed to be going on. The point of the exercise seems to be verbal ingenuity, coupled with the message that pleasure can be damned hard, long work...
...precisely this boldness and individualism which offends others draws Wright to these thinkers. The clarity and friendliness of the author's prose allows us to enjoy a triptych of scientists at work. We watch each of them grow with their ideas, which both guide them and are in turn reshaped by their contributions...
...virtually no planning, no ability to respond to Bush's attacks, and logistics out of the whistle-stop era. Dukakis would have to work until after midnight revising a speech he had just received for the next morning's breakfast event. All too often the candidate would take wooden prose and tired arguments and, miraculously, make them even blander. Small wonder that the campaign message was upstaged by everything from hecklers to a defensive Dukakis response to Bush's latest charges...
...balance of power in the 18th century depended on the weight and professionalism of one's navy. Tuchman devotes a great deal of space and vivid prose to the subject, from ship design to armaments and tactics. Her conclusion: England's vaunted sea force was crippled by poor leadership, corruption and an inflexible manual known as Fighting Instructions, deviation from which could and did get captains court-martialed...