The Dead Father
The writing is Mr. Barthelme at his most facile—flicking scenes onto the page with scarcely a breath. (“The road. The caravan. People taking pictures of the caravan with little pronghorn cameras. Flashes of light.”) The work can be grasped by any reader—even the least suspecting—as an appropriately slapstick homage to the spirit of anarchy.
Authors
’s opinions
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Through its gusto, its refusal to accept the views of the Establishment and its sheer high spirits Lucky Jim caught the contemporary spirit.
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Comedians will covet Mr. Barthelme’s control, which has nothing to do with caution. There is [the protagonist’s] mother’s recipe for brisket, for instance, which begins “What fool bought brisket?” and ends “Do what your mother tells you.”
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Mr. McEwan is a stirring writer, and his mastery of his pathetic household (and of us) is complete, but his strength is matched a weakness—a willingness to settle for a tour de force.
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An extraordinarily deft, lyrical, rich novel that catches the spirit of this country in an era between the turn of the century and the First World War in a fluid, musical way that is as original as it is satisfying.
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…too many contemporary authors still make convention do the work of invention. They are rewriting the 19th century novel without meaning to. In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles rewrites the 19th century novel and means every word of it.
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…one of the many distinguished Adamses, this one an all-round intellectual—historian and philosopher—as well as a political meddler and perennial grouch. […] He felt extremely sorry for himself, and was ever more certain that the world was going to pot.
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MacNeice, though closely associated with Auden and others, stood apart from them. He had a detachments from the then fashionable ideology and would, one feels, have been more at home with the aesthetes of the 1890s.
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Lucid and lightly elegant though the prose is, there is something of James Joyces’s Ulysses[…]it is in the feeling that the book conveys that a man can be quite insignificant to the world at large, and beset by all the sins and ills of humanity, yet still live an intensely acceptable life.
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If she did not sit so tight on her natural religious bent she would be a featherweight able to knock out.
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[Jim] is a wonderful comic creation, lazy and despicable like Evelyn Waugh’s picaresque heroes, but triumphant in the end.
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The World in the Evening is far too shadowy for good photography, and the one thing Mr. Isherwood does not try to be in this, his new novel, is a camera.
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As a personal and retrospective bit of fiction, Prater Violet is well cut—Mr. Isherwood’s technique is a paradigm of modulation and good taste. The objective suggestions, however, are cloudy, possibly escapist.
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…Mr Christopher Isherwood has never seemed to claim more than unworldliness for his Berlin figures…
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Dracula cannot be described as a domestic novel, nor its annals as those of a quiet life. The circumstances described are from the first peculiar.
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He possesses in eminent degree that power which at once rarest and most necessary to a novelist, the faculty of imaginative design without extravagance of execution.
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So keenly is the scent followed, so carefully is the evidence collected, so gradual is the completion of the design, that it is difficult to imagine the writer so free from the uncertainty he makes so spell-like to his readers…
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This is a very bold fiction; and, did not the author, in a short Preface, make a kind of apology, we should almost pronounce it to be impious. We hope, however, the writer had the moral in view which we are desirous of drawing from it, that the presumptive works of man must be frightful, vile, and horrible; ending only in discomfort and misery to himself.
Lucky Jim
Paradise
The Cement Garden
Ragtime
The French Lieutenant's Woman
Henry Adams
The Strings are False
A Single Man
The Girls of Slender Means
The World in the Evening
Prater Violet
Goodbye to Berlin
Dracula
Wilkie Collins
The Woman in White
Frankenstein