Word: realists
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...were past caring and past caring about. Truffaut's centrifugal direction sends pieces of crime thriller, love story, and psychological case study flying off at unrelated tangents. Moreover, Piano Player suggests that the New Wave is carrying its own logic to absurdity. Together with the Neo-Realist school of French fiction led by Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet (TIME, July 20), the New Wave set out to give the "object" its due. In Piano Player, things-the honky-tonk piano, the hero's brass bed, an auto careening through the night-are vibrantly and almost independently alive...
...exceptions. The two young people seem to have flung themselves into their coy positions only a moment ago, and they look as if they might just as hurriedly get up to go on about their business. The manicured landscape in the background is strangely sentimental for a realist like Hals; critics believe that he was using some fashionable symbology. A garden was the traditional home of Venus; the peacocks may refer to Juno, the protectress of marriage, and the ivy behind the young woman could be the symbol of fidelity...
Many of their books, turgid with description, tormented by tricks, are all but unreadable. Most demand far more persistence than any reader (except, possibly, a fellow writer studying technique) will ever-or should ever-give. The plunging power of one outstanding Neo-Realist, Claude Simon, dissipates too often in Faulknerian tangles-1000-word sentences and sets-within-sets of parenthetical statements. Inevitably, too, as experimenters, Neo-Realists have wallowed in pretentious critical nonsense. Their mechanical techniques, almost inevitably, have allowed a number of non-novelists to masquerade as writers of fiction. Neo-Realist Marguerite Duras' pure conversational tour...
...strictures into virtues. The third, and least, in some ways makes the most interesting case study. It was William Dean Howells. not Twain or James, who presided over American literature for 50 years, who fought the critical battles for realism, and who, as the country's first avowed realist, was righteously damned as a vulgarian and a sensationalist...
...Dostoevsky, the realities they wrote of were to him merely Russian realities; it would be impossible to write a Russian novel in the U.S., he wrote, because here life took on a more "smiling aspect." Biographer Edwin H. Cady presents evidence that the peculiar blindness of this reticent realist may have had a base in neurosis. The son of an Ohio printer, Howells was a weedy adolescent plagued by acute vertigo, hypochondria and a tendency to uncontrollable homesickness. His literary ability won him a job as city editor of a Cincinnati newspaper, but his first view of police court sent...