Word: protagonists
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Keyes' fantasy, only slightly improbable, explores the effects of a brain operation that turns a 32-year-old moron into an intellectual genius, but one still plagued by psychic traumas inflicted in childhood. Cast in the form of the protagonist's diary entries, his is one of the most extraordinary books of the decade. Reading it is an amazing educational experience. One gets to understand the learning process, society's attitudes toward the mentally retarded, the difference between intellectual and emotional maturity, and the essence of human dignity. The author shows here a masterly ability to handle sensitive insights, pathos...
Subsequently the Committee met with the Rev. Hanson and four of his supporters. This quintet aimed most of its artillery at the second book, The Emperor of ice-cream. Particular objection was voiced (1) to the protagonist's "irreverent" references to a statue and to his mother's religious values; (2) to the "gutter language" and reference to various anatomical organs: and (3) to two admittedly unconsummated sexual scenes that, it was felt, "could not help but sexually arouse children and adults alike...
Joseph McElroy's startling first novel, A Smuggler's Bible, was about a man trying to invent a world and then smuggle himself into the lives of his invented and remembered populace. In the author's second novel, Hind's Kidnap, the protagonist is obsessed by the search for a kidnaped four-year-old child, as well as a hunt for clues to his own early background, and the attempt to dekidnap himself and all his friends who have been stolen away from their childhood into an adopted adulthood. The excellent but dumfoundingly prolix result...
Like Diogenes, Stephen Becker has spent most of his career as a novelist searching for an honest man-or at least a protagonist who can face a tough moral decision with honesty. In A Covenant with Death, a youthful judge must decide the fate of a man who kills his executioner after being convicted of a murder that he did not commit. Juice concerns a wealthy businessman fighting the machinery mobilized to exonerate him of the drunken-driving death of a pedestrian. Now, in his sixth novel, Becker, 42, turns back to the Civil War. In an excellent period morality...
...quick-paced ending of the film comes unexpectedly, since it follows two inordinately slow scenes of the protagonist walking in Boston and riding in a car. The length of these scenes leads the viewer to expect the film to taper...