Word: stylist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...should the reader of this book. Only Amis' talent as a storyteller and stylist keeps Girl, 20 from settling into the pettiest smugness. But then, an Amis novel has always been like a naughty jaunt on a thinly iced pond. Too much moral or critical weight concentrated in any one place means breaking through to the shallows beneath the surface...
...kind of phrases he lampoons in a piece on reviewers' jargon, Baker is a man of range, sensitive intellect and fertile imagination. He is also a fine stylist whose columns frequently unfurl to defend the language against corruption. But to read 212 pages of him at a sitting is a mistake. He is most effective in his newspaper, where the reader can wade expectantly toward him through bloated accounts of disaster, inhumanity, avarice and hypocrisy. Russell Baker can then best be appreciated doing what a good humorist has always done: writing to preserve his sanity for at least...
...deeper problem lies with Max himself, who was too much the fastidious dandy, too much the meticulous stylist, to serve as a vehicle for the broad, boisterous traffic of the stage. He considered his twelve-year stint as drama critic for London's Saturday Review a penance in the form of intellectual slumming. He viewed the theater's vulgarity with distaste, and the occasional passion of high drama with skepticism. He had his muses-grace, urbanity, nuance-and he served them exquisitely, but those girls never make the chorus line...
...Proust gets another whirl from Novelist Elizabeth Bowen. She takes the character of Bergotte, Proust's fictitious writer of fiction, and after wondering briefly whether the original might have been Anatole France, finally decides Bergotte is really a "standin, scapegoat, whipping-boy for" Proust-particularly as a purple stylist and a snob...
This is a pity, for Sillitoe is a writer of considerable talent: an ingenious storyteller, a stylist and, best of all, a genuinely rebellious spirit. Now, with a bow to Defoe and Fielding, he offers a cheerful picaresque novel subtitled "the ordinary and not so ordinary adventures of a bastard and a proletarian . . . when the star of his destiny takes him to London and sundry places...