Word: transition
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Transit has much in common with the archetypal "old stories" of love and tragedy that form our literary past. It's almost schematic in outline, obeying some huge Sophoclean unity of thirty years' tragedy. Hazzard carefully constructs the work to fit this ancient paradigm and moves with silent and relentless force along a cosmic plan of the way things are in the world, and should be in a novel...
Characters here are, as an airport sign reads, "Passengers in Transit," moving through emotions alone, along intersecting orbits in mechanical mystery. When staid government official Christian Thrale meets orphan Grace Bell at the symphony, two strangers' historical curves come together and fall into relation...
...tangled" in history, their personal lives snarled or braided in its net. She buries the sprawling abstract formalism of the book, so reminiscent of the ancient tragedians and the old stories of Hardy and George Eliot, her literary forebearers, beneath a shimmering surface of immediacy. The novel makes its transit through lines and stars through the inner spaces of loneliness and passion...
...story of such world-ranging pathos as Transit of Venus might be expected to lapse into the trite romantic-melodrama that fills airport book racks. But Hazzard errs infrequently. She makes sentimental slips in directing the plot; but they remain only minor errors, like those of other great writers, short detours from her delicate discipline...
...intriguing way, even these flaws contribute to making this an "important" book. The Transit of Venus upholds the continuum of "great literature." While it is brilliantly modern and engrossing for our age, it appeals to the problems of life, to our steadier thoughts, and to the timeless mysticism of a story well told. Far more than a museum piece, it retains a seriousness and dignity beyond most contemporary fiction...