Word: prose
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...second half as a coldly terrifying Dionyza, the evil queen of Tarsus who plots the murder of our heroine Marina. (Taylor's final appearance, as the goddess Diana in an extraordinary strip tease scene, was equally impressive. But, unfortunately, the moment is ephemeral and cannot be recaptured in prose...
Fiction fans who relish in richness of prose would find Girl in Landscape only bordering on satisfaction. A review in Timeout NY put it best: "Most often, [Girl in Landscape] reads like a children's book for adults," a description hardly convincing for admirers of the silky lushness of, say, the novels of Rushdie or Morrison. Much more than style, however, the ideas expounded in the novel and the way author Jonathan Lethem structures them raise this book to its own, medium-high pedestal. At the most basic level, the novel is a literary reenactment of John Ford...
...compensating for an overly transparent style. Maybe Lethem's next works will stray, stylistically, from the clarity that one of his epigraphs calls for, quoting none other than John Wayne: "I don't trust ambiguity." Ambiguity plagues words for Pella; perhaps it should begin to spill into Lethem's prose as well...
...writer turns 55, the old double nickel, and the slender thread of inspiration has unraveled and you clomp around in circles like an old pony at the pony ride and beautiful women come up and tell you how much their mothers liked something you did in 1975. Your prose style turns flabby. Your work has the shelf life of tropical fish. Compared to that, fathering a baby is sheer nobility, a shot at immortality...
...better widget and sell more of it is one thing; quite another if he or she goes home listlessly unconcerned with human life and human attachments having to do with respect for the elderly, a love for one's family, the capacity to take joy from Christian perspectives. Papal prose is turgid, but here the Pope did say in almost as many words that socialism was an extravagant historical failure...