Word: novelizations
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...much as these stories enrich one another, they also add weight, and occasionally the accumulation becomes more than the novel can bear. Horn writes in slyly beautiful prose—a forest at sunset can suddenly become “a drawstring bag…tightening the early evening sky with wrinkles of naked branches”—but the movements between storylines often feel heavy and imposed. But when Ben comes home from the museum and looks at the Chagall painting (a study of a man floating over a city), we read that Ben himself feels...
Still, the corners of Horn’s novel are nailed down solidly enough to make up for any rough edges. “The World to Come,” as it reaches for the heavens, may not soar toward profundity with quite the ease that many of its loquacious characters do; but it is Horn’s thoughtfully arranged, vibrantly written examination of people in their private times of crisis that makes her book memorable...
...Kalfus’ new novel, “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country,” is one of the only pieces of 9/11 art that forces Americans to look at how the spirit of the country has changed after the terrorist attacks. His uneven but captivating rumination on the intersection of divorce, terrorism, and national unity perfectly describes some of the darkest machinations of the American soul with an odd muddling of insight bordering on the Shakespearean and sardonic litotes befitting Jon Stewart...
Kalfus mirrors the postdiluvian upheaval in the U.S. through the battles fought in the Harrimans’ marital war. Both the commentary in Kalfus’ novel and the joy of reading it radiates from this nearly-pornographic voyeurism into the couple’s fights, the epic “blistering argument[s] encompassing all the issues that had brought them to divorce in the first place,” and their underlying emotional dysfunction—“when they watched news of wars on TV, reports from the Balkans or the West Bank, they would think...
Connubial battles punctuate the novel with tightly drawn scenes of psychological trauma. The hate that permeates the Harriman saga doesn’t make it palatable—if anything, it makes it easier to accept the harm being inflicted upon them and their friends. But such emotional detachment makes the novel read like the screenplay to a mediocre action movie. This tacky quality is disappointing considering the maturity and wit of Kalfus’ overall narrative aesthetic...