Word: protagonist
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Such a sensitive male is an unusual protagonist for Anita Brookner, the * acclaimed British novelist who won the 1984 Booker McConnell Prize for Hotel du Lac. Most often she focuses her exacting eye on women, solitary spinsters picking their way through uneventful but carefully examined lives. Lewis Percy is reminiscent of all of those awkward, hapless English twits, those Lucky Jims who comically court failure in the farcical novels of Kingsley Amis, William Boyd and David Lodge. But though it has brisk satirical asides, Lewis Percy is a halfhearted comedy. We cannot sympathize for long with so ineffectual a hero...
...small southern town of Rhymers Creek, the book has as its protagonist Lila Mae Bower Pietrowsky. Lila Mae is well-intentioned, a good Christian woman who believes she is leading her disordered life as best she can. Her husband has left her. Her mother is a meddling hypochondriac. Wellsley Coe, whom Lila Mae has admired since high school, has insulted her virtue by asking her to have sex with him. And she is shocked and disappointed to discover that half the staff in the convalescent home where she works is homosexual...
...writes the book with three different names. Caryl Fleishmann-Stanger writes the forward. Isadora Wing, the heroine of Jong's most famous novel Fear of Flying, writes the story itself and is given to recording, in the middle of narrative text, arbitrary conversations with Leila Sand, the novel's protagonist...
...real problem with this technique is that the reader begins to sympathize with Wing instead of the ridiculously self-indulgent protagonist. For example, the forward mentions a note that Wing supposedly writes to her research assistant at the end of the first chapter: "[Please] do a computer search and see how many times the word "cock" is used in this chapter. I feel like I'm drowning in pubic hair--if he prongs her once more I'll scream...
...this "Land of Fuck" where Jong locates Any Woman's Blues, both as a title and as a concept. While Jong claims that the book "has as its theme a woman's search for a way out of addictive love and toward real selflove," the protagonist continues to flip back and forth between emotional and physical addiction, with a clear bent towards the physical...