Word: themes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Novelist Naipaul's leisurely plot is often too clotted with local color, and he rings too many changes on a basically simple theme. But his picture of Ganesh, the huckster Hindu, is the best job of its kind since Joyce Gary looked through the wambly brown eyes of Mister Johnson...
McLaughlin, a journalist as well as a novelist (he is an associate editor of TIME), has an unerring eye for the Manhattan landscape, a faithful ear for the speech of the superficially smart. Although he never preaches, and the explicit statement of his theme never rises above the pitch of party talk, the reader is not allowed to forget the book's title; it would be a different story if any of the characters really had a notion...
...Cain and Abel" theme of Steinbeck's novel does not become vivid until the very end of the movie. Rather the story suggests Tom Jones or Huckleberry Finn.Caleb Trask, (Jimmy Dean) is really a good guy at heart, but there is no one around to tell him he is "no good" because his father has rejected him. His pranks are worthy of a Tom Sawyer--but the complication lies in the fact that his brother Aaron is not a prig or toady, but a good guy too. To further complicate the situation, Alma (Julie Harris), the "Becky Sharp...
...been a war about it," one character remarks. But there is no war, not even compensation for the widow. Instead, Meg faces only a set of sad second choices-social work, the society of Angry Young Men, bohemian sex. While Author Wilson unfolds a kind of serial on the theme of "Which Weeds Will the Widow Wear?" he also presents a series of sharp, lantern-slide portraits of modern England...
...this is the weakest of the three novels, both because Mountolive himself is basically an uninteresting man and because the introduction of politics as the theme makes puppets of Justine, Nessim and Pursewarden. As in all political life, there is the effect of contrivance rather than spontaneity, of truckling to slogans rather than living by inner compulsions...