Word: protagonists
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Methods aside, McMahon draws on a more direct connection between his work as a professor and his writing. Gordon McKay, protagonist of McKay's Bees, is a familiar name in Harvard science departments. About 50 scientists, including almost the whole faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences Department, owe their livelihood to his very large endowment. McMahon, one of the flock, pays tribute with his novel--"90 per cent of the book is lies about Gordon McKay," he says, though the last chapter, in which McKay returns to Cambridge, makes a fortune in shoe manufacturing, and befriends several Harvard faculty members...
There is nothing wrong in general with the nebbish-as-protagonist, as Joyce amply demonstrated in The Dubliners. But when the author relies on us to see the staggering evil of the holocaust through his eyes, he needs to give the protagonist some kind of stature; Stingo crumbles under the weight of the apocalypse...
...Herr (Dispatches) to write a narration that attempts to fill in Willard's personality ex post facto on the sound track. That narration-alternately sensitive, psychopathic, literary, gung-ho and antiwar-is self-contradictory and often at odds with Willard's behavior. It does not establish the protagonist as a credible figure or begin to achieve Coppola's loftier goal of charting Willard's tailspin into psychological terror. Eventually, the voice-over commentary becomes a makeshift panacea for the film's many other defects: it hastily clarifies plot points and states themes that Coppola...
...story has its promising aspects. The protagonist (Roy Scheider, an actor who deserves something more than merely serviceable roles) is a shaky employee of the FBAP-the Federal Bureau of Advanced Paranoia, that usually unnamed, entirely fictional dirty-tricks agency that turns up with distressing regularity in recent movies. The reason Roy is shaky is that a bunch of baddies have killed his wife while aiming at him. Discharged from a rest home, he gets the strong impression that his bosses no longer have any use for him, and indeed we see them running his dossier through the paper shredder...
Osborn seems to do nothing more than reuse the ingredients of The Paper Chase for his new novel--a glamorous setting, a love interest, a perceptive but inexperienced protagonist coming up against uncompromising traditions. The Associates reads like a novelization of the bad TV movie which it will undoubtedly become...