Word: tone
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This extraordinarily compressed passage, appearing early in the novel, sets the tone for much that follows. Michaels not only creates an imaginary poet, she also examines the ways in which a poetic imagination can arise out of horror. That Jakob survives at all is a miracle. After days of hiding, he is finally driven by hunger to risk his fate by approaching a stranger. "I screamed into the silence the only phrase I knew in more than one language, I screamed it in Polish and German and Yiddish, thumping my fists on my own chest: dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty...
...fall apart nastily. But even this calamity, which involves blood and dead people (the pot growers lose patience), does not touch the survivors. They grab sandals and rucksacks and move on. Richard reports all this a year later from London, where he is tethered to an unspecified job. His tone is one of mild regret, which seems to be the author's view as well, though that's hard to say. If Garland is aware that he has written satire, he gives no sign of it. --By John Skow...
...middle ground among extremes." "In America," says Kwan, "I am free to choose any definition oflife I please." Perhaps, but I certainly hope I am not free to act on any definition of life I please. A great many American citizens once held that people of darker skin tone were somehow less than human beings, and therefore to be enslaved or disposed of as those Americans saw fit; fortunately, such people were eventually prevented from acting on their particular definition of human life. I am not free to redefine life as excluding the old, the infirm, or a child...
...BOOKS . . . THE KISS: "It might be better if this woeful memoir had been a novel; its tone of hysterical self-obsession might pass as fiction," notes TIME's Martha Duffy. But Kathryn Harrison has already drawn on the theme of adult incest in her 1991 novel, Thicker than Water, to no great reverberance, so in The Kiss (Random House; 207 pages; $20) she tries the currently fashionable route of confession. Hers: an affair with her father. Harrison?s preacher father was kicked out of the house by her mother and grandparents when she was tiny, and she had almost...
...BOOKS . . . THE KISS: "It might be better if this woeful memoir had been a novel; its tone of hysterical self-obsession might pass as fiction," notes TIME's Martha Duffy. But Kathryn Harrison has already drawn on the theme of adult incest in her 1991 novel, Thicker than Water, to no great reverberance, so in The Kiss (Random House; 207 pages; $20) she tries the currently fashionable route of confession. Hers: an affair with her father. Harrison?s preacher father was kicked out of the house by her mother and grandparents when she was tiny, and she had almost...