Word: chapter
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...first reading, this new chapter in what Poet Robert Lowell has called "my verse autobiography" seems anticlimactic, a retelling of what took place after the curtain dropped. For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, both published in 1973, took Lowell through the termination of his second marriage and the beginning of his third. The poetry in those two paired volumes was only infrequently up to Lowell's best, but the sustained drama of the situation-and the poet's vivid evocations of both anguish and exhilaration-provided enough momentum to carry even weak poems along...
...happened -God knows that in San Francisco you don't have to make it up." San Francisco suburbanites had their own serial in the Pacific Sun until its author, Cyra McFadden, got a book contract and published The Serial (Knopf; $4.95), a fast-selling, funny, 52-chapter account of Living Together Relationships and Creative Divorce Groups in Marin County...
...last-minute order of a stay of execution to the electrocution itself. He quotes extensively (and with considerable repetition) from the Rosenbergs' trial transcripts and their prison letters, President Eisenhower's speeches, contemporary issues of TIME (which becomes a character mockingly called the "National Poet Laureate"). One chapter is devoted to the contents of the June 19 New York Times. In the next chapter, Vice President Nixon is shown reading the same issue of the Times, and that patch of earth is scorched once again...
...character named Richard Nixon narrates nearly every other chapter in the novel, where the best and worst in Coover's method coexist with greatest strain. His portrait of an ambitious, insecure and privately obsessed public man is remarkably comprehensive and even moving. If only the character were not named Nixon, all would be well. But Coover allows no distinction between his fiction and the living man; much of the humor depends on a knowledge of the real Nixon's career. As the fictional Nixon's humiliations increase (he is made to appear seminude in front...
...central weakness of The Public Burning can be traced to Coover's attempt to illuminate extremes by making them more extreme. The Rosenbergs' trial and execution were a passionate chapter in an overheated era. Even now, 24 years after their deaths, questions about the couple's guilt or innocence quickly grow heated. Manias stalked the land in the "50s; public and private life had the quality of a Manichaean morality play. Coover knows this, presents all the evidence, and then denies his book the ability to touch hearts or minds instead of nerves. What might have been...