Word: scarlette
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Despite the helping hand of Jeanne Bernkopf, one of Manhattan's most experienced free-lance editors, Scarlett still needs a story stronger than girl chases boy. The excessive number of extended and inconclusive family gatherings recalls Mitchell's comment in Gone With the Wind: "When a Southerner took the trouble to pack a trunk and travel 20 miles for a visit, the visit was seldom of shorter duration than a month." Scarlett could also use a dose of Joyce Carol Oates' gothic intensity...
...takes the reader only a few pages to realize that Ripley has had to / forfeit the novelist's right to create her own characters. Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara sprang from everything Mitchell knew and felt about a time that was still fresh in her region's memory. Ripley's self-imposed handicap shows in the dialogue. Mitchell gave her sardonic hero the best lines, hard- bitten and vivid in the Raymond Chandler style. "I've seen eyes like yours above a dueling pistol," he says to Scarlett. "They evoke no ardor in the male breast." Ripley's Rhett...
More fireworks would be welcome. Gone With the Wind played against the most important event in American history, the war that swept away the feudal South and laid the foundations for the modern nation-state. Scarlett begins in 1873, during the late Reconstruction. It is not a romantic period. The first half of the novel finds America's original Material Girl, now 30, shopping and socializing in Atlanta, Savannah and Charleston, where she bumps into Rhett Butler, a wealthy scalawag. She still wants what she cannot have: him. He still plays the can't-live-with-'em, can't-live...
...Scarlett wants to get in touch with her Irish roots, and Ripley wants to get her away from the freed slaves and budding Klansmen of the Reconstruction South. Pushing a complex reality under the Old Sod solves the problem of having to create substantial roles for black characters. When hired to write the book, Ripley insisted on a contemporary treatment of race, specifically the avoidance of dialect. Her method is to retain speech patterns while providing elocution lessons...
...While Scarlett errs on the side of political correctness, Gone With the Wind -- its minstrel-show dialogue intact -- still sells like buttermilk biscuits. The irony does not seem to disturb the Mitchell estate. Ripley, a seasoned professional, apparently understood what she was getting paid so well to do: write the book that was doomed from conception to be endlessly compared to the original. Scarlett is the South's new Lost Cause...