Word: protagonists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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David Guterson is among the least trendy of writers. The protagonist's mother in Guterson's new novel, East of the Mountains (Harcourt Brace; 277 pages; $25), believes "we know ourselves through the work we do"; she speaks against lowering standards at apple-packing conferences. Guterson, known for his flannel shirts and the home schooling of his four children, was until recently a high school teacher who cited as his inspiration the schoolroom classic To Kill a Mockingbird. But in the midst of this unpresuming existence, his meticulously researched yet crackling debut novel, Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), became...
...Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, the truly poignant novel in the lot, never brings its witty protagonist, Jane, to the altar, but it traces her love life episodically from the time she is 14 through her 20s and 30s as she orbits Manhattan's publishing world. There is an exquisite honesty to Jane's relationships; she suffers plenty, but her stories serve as a testament to the value of not living one's life with emotional thriftiness. The final scene in the book has Jane purposely withholding interest in a man she likes because the authors of The Rules...
...held himself and all others, a code of scrupulous honesty, precision, self-control, courage, skill and stoicism: and the code which governed his life also pervades his spare and detached writing, dictating not only the actions and responses of his heroes and heroines from Nick Adams through the protagonist known to the American high-schooler only as the Old Man, but also the shape of his sentences and the white spaces he substitutes for adjectives and adverbs...
...play is titled Antigone, but the real protagonist is the governor Creon. Bishop takes the role and plays it to the hilt. Her Creon is just this side of crazy: she is inflexible, imperial (ironically so considering she supports the Union and "liberty"), wrathful and utterly compelling. The other actors seem to feed off of her unreasonableness, engaging the viewers as they desperately attempt to get her to compromise. "A foe is never a friend, even in death," she declares. Although Antigone knows in advance the consequences of her actions, stating her loyalty to the dead and her willingness...
...feel of the play itself can be described as a cross between Kafka's The Trial and the Coen Brothers' comedies (The Big Lebowski). The protagonist Gross, played by Tom Prince '02, is a self-proclaimed humanist who has been blackmailed into allowing Ptydepe to become the official means of intra-office communication by his assistant, the nefarious Ballas, played expertly by Johannes Mowth, and, presumably, by the silent accomplice Mr. Pillar (Malka Resnicoff '00/Hostetler). As Gross begins his quest to set things right and prevent the ridiculously efficient language from taking over, he meets an absurd cast of office...