Word: vanorden
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WATER Music, by Bianco VanOrden (254 pp.; Harcourt, Brace; $3.95), is at bottom an old-fashioned novel about the tortuous ways of young love, even if its style flashes like high-IQ gossip and the characters are as plausibly etched as perfect counterfeit money. In 309 East & a Night of Levitation (TIME, Oct. 7, 1957), Author VanOrden showed a nice disinterest in anything ordinary. Now she makes up ordinary faces as if they were being prepared for an Italian fancy-dress ball. Her young Americans are rich, educated and self-consciously tortured by love and the need to prove that...
...Author VanOrden sends them all off to Italy on holiday. They are herded, shooed and advised, but never chaperoned, by a sophisticated marchesa. Living in a Florentine convent, they talk, dream, paint, write, compose, writhe in the agonies of their love affairs, while the sisters of the convent go calmly about their business and the great art of Florence forms a soothing backdrop. Author VanOrden's plot seems hardly worth the time. What is best about her flashingly literate book is the handsomely sketched Florentine setting, against which the bright chatter of her young Americans seems like a volatile...
...these top-notch stories, Author VanOrden can lay out an extraordinary writer's poker hand because she holds most of the good cards: sharp insights, a playwright's knack for setting a scene, fundamental sympathy and writing that never wastes its breath...
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