Word: protagonists
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Brinkley, the protagonist in Robert Mayer's comical novel Superfolks, was sinking into complacent and oh-so-comfortable middle class, middle age life on Swansdown Island, a "suburban pocked" retreat outside New York. Beneath his happily married, proud-daddy exterior, he was helplessly wondering why his superpowers were inexplicably vanishing...
OFTEN, in contemporary novels, the protagonist sees his identity as bound up in the past, in the acknowledgement of his roots. Colin too suspects that his identity derives from the world he has left behind, and he is constantly looking back, hoping it will overtake him. But when he turns toward Saxton, his home, he finds it empty of meaning, as insensible as the coal to which his father has mortgaged his existence. "It's no good hanging on," Colin finally tells the older woman he deserts, with sudden insight. The alternative, beautifully inevitable in Saville, is to walk fearlessly...
Harry Gallanty '79 is writing a book entitled The Cosmic Explorer. The protagonist is an extraterrestrial anthropologist who decides to study human culture of the 70s. Gallanty, a mathematics concentrator who left Harvard in the fall of 1975 to address the World Food Conference at the U.N., now travels around schools in the east and south, collecting material for his book. Gallanty is insightful and clear-thinking--not one of your fried-on-dope types. To the best of my knowledge, Gallanty plays no instruments, though he might hum and probably whistles. He is in Cambridge for three weeks; meet...
...lack of selfhood, the novelist faces an imposing task. In this case, he succeeds only in order to fail. Evoking Jed's self-confessed insubstantiality by equipping him with poetic phrases and intellectual rationalizations in place of emotions, Warren purposely forfeits the possibility of making his protagonist a fully rounded, artistically engaging human being. Jed is a small triumph of characterization, but a pyrrhic one nonetheless...
Through the death of Jed's first wife, the ending of his affair and his subsequent remarriage and divorce, Warren skillfully ties his protagonist's sufferings to his pastlessness. For Jed, reality is both elusive and painful, and escape from pain involves flight into a world without time. The costs of such flight are severe, but in A Place to Come To they are too often intellectually understood rather than emotionally endured...