A lot of awesome things don't work together. But every now and then, someone thinks to combine two amazing, unrelated things that no one would expect to go together. Two things like early nineteenth Century poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and AMC crime drama Breaking Bad.
Thursday, May 8, 2014
Monday, May 5, 2014
1969: Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
The Author:
Philip Roth (1933- ) was born in the Weequahic neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, and was the son of first-generation Eastern-European Jewish immigrants. He graduated Weequahic High School in 1950, and went on to receive a degree in English from Brucknell University. From there, he received his Masters in Literature from the University of Chicago in 1955. He met Margaret Martinson the following year, and married her in 1959. During this time, he taught college English courses at institutions including the University of Chicago, University of Iowa, and later Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1959, he published his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, a collection of five stories and a novella, which received considerable critical and popular acclaim, and won the National Book Award. Roth and Martinson split up in 1963. Roth's next to novels, Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967), were given less attention than his first book. Then he published Portnoy's Complaint. The explicit masturbation throughout the novel made the book incredibly controversial: the book was banned in many U.S. libraries and Australia declared the importation of the book to be illegal. This made Roth a public figure in a way he'd never been before.
In 1990, Roth married his long-time partner, Claire Bloom. The two split up in 1994, and Bloom published an unflattering memoir of their relationship, titled Leaving a Doll's House. Roth's novel I Married a Communist (1998) is seen as being partially based on, and in refutation to, Bloom's accusations.
Roth has published 27 books of fiction and four books of non-fiction. He's won two National Book Awards (Goodbye, Columbus 1959 and Sabbath's Theater 1995), the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (American Pastoral 1997), two National Book Critics Circle Awards (The Counterlife 1986 and Patrimony: A True Story 1991) and is the only writer to win three PEN/Faulkner Awards (Operation Shylock 1994, The Human Stain 2000, and Everyman 2007).
The Book:
Portnoy's Complaint, as defined by the novels de facto preface:
"A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature... neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overrideing feelings of shame and the dread of retribution."
The eponymous Alexander Portnoy, like Roth, is the son of Jewish parents living in a Jewish community in Newark. The story is told as a long monologue, delivered by Portnoy to his psychoanalyst, Dr. Spielvogel. The novel focuses on Portnoy's attempts to reconcile or move past his ethnic background as a twentieth-century American, and his sexual development and obsessions, and how the former affects the latter.
Portnoy is critical of his Jewish culture in the novel, in a way that is self-aware and very frank. He points out many hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies of Jewish American culture, all of which are exhibited by Portnoy's family. Portnoy declares "This is my life, my only life, and I'm living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in a Jewish joke -- only it ain't no joke!" (39-40). The Jewish mother stereotype is the most prevalent, with Portnoy's mother alternately lavishing praise on young Alexander and disowning him for any failures.
This last plays into the psychoanalysis aspect of the story, where many of the tropes of psychoanalytic theory (e.g. "Tell me about your mother...") blown to ridiculous proportions.
Portnoy at one point declares "I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off -- the sticky evidence is everywhere!" Even when discussing masturbation (which Roth does, a lot), there is a strange and effective combination of the high brow and the vulgar. The narrative voice, with its extreme self-consciousness and self-analysis, is one of the major attributes of Portnoy's Complaint that save it from being merely well-written smut. I won't go into great detail on the sexual escapades of Alexander Portnoy. To merely summarize them would take a couple thousand words. Besides the masturbation and the psychological havoc caused by Portnoy's guilt over it, the most important aspect would be Portnoy's relationship with a girl nicknamed "The Monkey."
Through this relationship, Porntoy's background (as a Jew dating a shikse), his sexual obsessions, and his current status (as a successful lawyer-turned-public-figure dating a semi-literate former model) come to a head and lead to near catastrophe.
This is a fantastic book, but it's easy to get distracted by the convoluted sexual fantasies and weird masturbation. While some authors try to make sex and masturbation beautiful, Roth pushes it in the other direction (not violent and horrifyingly depraved as in something like American Psycho, more of a reveling in the filth kind of way).
Roth's previous success with Goodbye, Columbus, combined with the controversy surrounding Portnoy, guaranteed its commercial success.
Portnoy's Complaint was given a film adaptation in 1972, which met with largely negative reviews. According to a review by Roger Ebert: "How could Philip Roth's saga of masturbation have been made into anything but an X-rated movie?...To be sure, Roth's subject and approach was in bad taste -- but in magnificently bad taste...When you try to handle bad taste in good taste, you almost always wind up with something truly obscene."
Portnoy's Complaint has since been added to Modern Library's list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century and TIME magazine's list of the 100 best novels since 1923.
If copious amounts of masturbation and long rants about sex and Jewish mothers liable to offend you, you probably shouldn't read this novel. Otherwise, I recommend it highly.
Bestselling novels of 1969:
1. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
2. The Godfather by Mario Puzo
3. The Love Machine by Jacqueline Susann
4. The Inheritors by Harold Robbins
5. The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
6. The Seven Minutes by Irving Wallace
7. Naked Came the Stranger by Penelope Ashe
8. The Promise by Chaim Potok
9. The Pretenders by Gwen Davis
10. The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier
Also published in 1969:
The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
Ada or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Sources:
"Philip Roth." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2012. Literature Resource Center. Web.
Roth, Philip. Portnoy's Complaint. 1969. New York: Bantam Books, 1970. Print.
Philip Roth (1933- ) was born in the Weequahic neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, and was the son of first-generation Eastern-European Jewish immigrants. He graduated Weequahic High School in 1950, and went on to receive a degree in English from Brucknell University. From there, he received his Masters in Literature from the University of Chicago in 1955. He met Margaret Martinson the following year, and married her in 1959. During this time, he taught college English courses at institutions including the University of Chicago, University of Iowa, and later Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1959, he published his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, a collection of five stories and a novella, which received considerable critical and popular acclaim, and won the National Book Award. Roth and Martinson split up in 1963. Roth's next to novels, Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967), were given less attention than his first book. Then he published Portnoy's Complaint. The explicit masturbation throughout the novel made the book incredibly controversial: the book was banned in many U.S. libraries and Australia declared the importation of the book to be illegal. This made Roth a public figure in a way he'd never been before.
In 1990, Roth married his long-time partner, Claire Bloom. The two split up in 1994, and Bloom published an unflattering memoir of their relationship, titled Leaving a Doll's House. Roth's novel I Married a Communist (1998) is seen as being partially based on, and in refutation to, Bloom's accusations.
Roth has published 27 books of fiction and four books of non-fiction. He's won two National Book Awards (Goodbye, Columbus 1959 and Sabbath's Theater 1995), the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (American Pastoral 1997), two National Book Critics Circle Awards (The Counterlife 1986 and Patrimony: A True Story 1991) and is the only writer to win three PEN/Faulkner Awards (Operation Shylock 1994, The Human Stain 2000, and Everyman 2007).
The Book:
Portnoy's Complaint, as defined by the novels de facto preface:
"A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature... neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overrideing feelings of shame and the dread of retribution."
The eponymous Alexander Portnoy, like Roth, is the son of Jewish parents living in a Jewish community in Newark. The story is told as a long monologue, delivered by Portnoy to his psychoanalyst, Dr. Spielvogel. The novel focuses on Portnoy's attempts to reconcile or move past his ethnic background as a twentieth-century American, and his sexual development and obsessions, and how the former affects the latter.
Portnoy is critical of his Jewish culture in the novel, in a way that is self-aware and very frank. He points out many hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies of Jewish American culture, all of which are exhibited by Portnoy's family. Portnoy declares "This is my life, my only life, and I'm living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in a Jewish joke -- only it ain't no joke!" (39-40). The Jewish mother stereotype is the most prevalent, with Portnoy's mother alternately lavishing praise on young Alexander and disowning him for any failures.
This last plays into the psychoanalysis aspect of the story, where many of the tropes of psychoanalytic theory (e.g. "Tell me about your mother...") blown to ridiculous proportions.
Portnoy at one point declares "I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off -- the sticky evidence is everywhere!" Even when discussing masturbation (which Roth does, a lot), there is a strange and effective combination of the high brow and the vulgar. The narrative voice, with its extreme self-consciousness and self-analysis, is one of the major attributes of Portnoy's Complaint that save it from being merely well-written smut. I won't go into great detail on the sexual escapades of Alexander Portnoy. To merely summarize them would take a couple thousand words. Besides the masturbation and the psychological havoc caused by Portnoy's guilt over it, the most important aspect would be Portnoy's relationship with a girl nicknamed "The Monkey."
Through this relationship, Porntoy's background (as a Jew dating a shikse), his sexual obsessions, and his current status (as a successful lawyer-turned-public-figure dating a semi-literate former model) come to a head and lead to near catastrophe.
This is a fantastic book, but it's easy to get distracted by the convoluted sexual fantasies and weird masturbation. While some authors try to make sex and masturbation beautiful, Roth pushes it in the other direction (not violent and horrifyingly depraved as in something like American Psycho, more of a reveling in the filth kind of way).
Roth's previous success with Goodbye, Columbus, combined with the controversy surrounding Portnoy, guaranteed its commercial success.
Portnoy's Complaint was given a film adaptation in 1972, which met with largely negative reviews. According to a review by Roger Ebert: "How could Philip Roth's saga of masturbation have been made into anything but an X-rated movie?...To be sure, Roth's subject and approach was in bad taste -- but in magnificently bad taste...When you try to handle bad taste in good taste, you almost always wind up with something truly obscene."
Portnoy's Complaint has since been added to Modern Library's list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century and TIME magazine's list of the 100 best novels since 1923.
If copious amounts of masturbation and long rants about sex and Jewish mothers liable to offend you, you probably shouldn't read this novel. Otherwise, I recommend it highly.
Bestselling novels of 1969:
1. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
2. The Godfather by Mario Puzo
3. The Love Machine by Jacqueline Susann
4. The Inheritors by Harold Robbins
5. The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
6. The Seven Minutes by Irving Wallace
7. Naked Came the Stranger by Penelope Ashe
8. The Promise by Chaim Potok
9. The Pretenders by Gwen Davis
10. The House on the Strand by Daphne du Maurier
Also published in 1969:
The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
Ada or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Sources:
"Philip Roth." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2012. Literature Resource Center. Web.
Roth, Philip. Portnoy's Complaint. 1969. New York: Bantam Books, 1970. Print.
Monday, April 21, 2014
1968: Airport by Arthur Hailey
The Author:
Arthur Hailey (1920-2004) was born Luton, Bedforshire, England. The son of a factory worker, financial challenges led Hailey to drop out of high school. When World War II hit, Hailey joined the Royal Air Force, In 1944, he married Joan Fishwick. In 1947, he moved from the UK to Canada, becoming a naturalized citizen with dual citizenship in 1952. He divorced Fishwick in 1950 and married Sheila Dunlop in 1951, to whom he was married the rest of his life.
In 1955, Hailey wrote the screenplay initially broadcasted in April 1956, titled Flight into Danger, about an old fighter pilot who is on a commercial plane when the pilot and copilot succumb to food poisoning. 1980's Airplane! is largely based on the film version of Flight into Danger, titled Zero Hour! Flight into Danger and another of Hailey's television plays were adapted into novels. In 1965, Hailey published Hotel, an inside look of the hotel industry that placed 8th on the annual bestsellers list. His next hit was Airport (1968), followed by Wheels, the #1 bestseller of 1971, The Moneychangers, the #2 bestseller of 1975, and Overload, the #3 bestseller of 1979. He also published Strong Medicine (1984), The Evening News (1990) and Detective (1997).
The Book:
Length: 440 Pages
Subject/Genre: Airports/Extreme Realism
Airport takes place at the Lincoln, Illinois international airport, over the course of a day. The main character, Mel Bakersfeld, has to deal with the a massive snowstorm, disgruntled employees, angry residents of a nearby community, and terrorist threats, in addition to a number of personal issues. Mel's personal issues are the least interesting part of the novel. The people all have their roles to play, but the main character of the novel is the airport itself.
What Michener or Uris are to history, Hailey is to industry. Airport is meticulously researched, and in many ways reads like a non-fiction account, which is not always a good thing, as it relies on details and infodumps that are not very pretty. As such, the plot is pretty contrived, but this is to an end: to create the various circumstances that the airport and its staff must respond to. The novel is more of an exposé on the inner workings of an airport.
The 1960's and early 70's are often referred to as the golden age of air travel, and the entire industry still had an exotic feel. It's easy to forget that the airplane was only 17 years older than Hailey. Hailey himself was 18 years old at the time of the first transatlantic commercial passenger flight. Hailey already had bestseller status, which is a great way to sell more copies of following releases. Add that to an industry that was booming and still mysterious, and it's not surprising that Airport became a bestseller.
Like most bestsellers, Airport was made into a film starring Burt Lancaster in 1970. Helen Hayes won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role in the film.
The airplane-disaster-film genre being at its peak, three increasingly bizarre sequels followed the 1970 film.
First was 1974's Airport 1975, starring Charlton Heston.
Followed by Airport '77 (1977) starring Jack Lemmon. In this one, art thieves hijack the plane and crash, the plane ending up stuck under water.
And finally, The Concorde... Airport '79
Airport was pretty dry, overall, and the characters were two-dimensional plot devices. The novel is more interesting as an inside look at the functioning of an airport, but written in layman's terms. If the subject is something you want to know more about, Airport is a good read. Otherwise you'll likely be bored.
Bestselling novels of 1968:
1. Airport by Arthur Hailey
2. Couples by John Updike
3. The Salzburg Connection by Helen MacInnes
4. A Small Town in Germany by John le Carré
5. Testimony of Two Men by Taylor Caldwell
6. Preserve and Protect by Allen Drury
7. Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal
8. Vanished by Fletcher Knebel
9. Christy by Catherine Marshall
10. The Tower of Babel by Morris West
Also published in 1968:
Arthur C. Clarke - 2001: A Space Odyssey
Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Cancer Ward
Arthur Hailey (1920-2004) was born Luton, Bedforshire, England. The son of a factory worker, financial challenges led Hailey to drop out of high school. When World War II hit, Hailey joined the Royal Air Force, In 1944, he married Joan Fishwick. In 1947, he moved from the UK to Canada, becoming a naturalized citizen with dual citizenship in 1952. He divorced Fishwick in 1950 and married Sheila Dunlop in 1951, to whom he was married the rest of his life.
In 1955, Hailey wrote the screenplay initially broadcasted in April 1956, titled Flight into Danger, about an old fighter pilot who is on a commercial plane when the pilot and copilot succumb to food poisoning. 1980's Airplane! is largely based on the film version of Flight into Danger, titled Zero Hour! Flight into Danger and another of Hailey's television plays were adapted into novels. In 1965, Hailey published Hotel, an inside look of the hotel industry that placed 8th on the annual bestsellers list. His next hit was Airport (1968), followed by Wheels, the #1 bestseller of 1971, The Moneychangers, the #2 bestseller of 1975, and Overload, the #3 bestseller of 1979. He also published Strong Medicine (1984), The Evening News (1990) and Detective (1997).
The Book:
Length: 440 Pages
Subject/Genre: Airports/Extreme Realism
Airport takes place at the Lincoln, Illinois international airport, over the course of a day. The main character, Mel Bakersfeld, has to deal with the a massive snowstorm, disgruntled employees, angry residents of a nearby community, and terrorist threats, in addition to a number of personal issues. Mel's personal issues are the least interesting part of the novel. The people all have their roles to play, but the main character of the novel is the airport itself.
What Michener or Uris are to history, Hailey is to industry. Airport is meticulously researched, and in many ways reads like a non-fiction account, which is not always a good thing, as it relies on details and infodumps that are not very pretty. As such, the plot is pretty contrived, but this is to an end: to create the various circumstances that the airport and its staff must respond to. The novel is more of an exposé on the inner workings of an airport.
The 1960's and early 70's are often referred to as the golden age of air travel, and the entire industry still had an exotic feel. It's easy to forget that the airplane was only 17 years older than Hailey. Hailey himself was 18 years old at the time of the first transatlantic commercial passenger flight. Hailey already had bestseller status, which is a great way to sell more copies of following releases. Add that to an industry that was booming and still mysterious, and it's not surprising that Airport became a bestseller.
Like most bestsellers, Airport was made into a film starring Burt Lancaster in 1970. Helen Hayes won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role in the film.
The airplane-disaster-film genre being at its peak, three increasingly bizarre sequels followed the 1970 film.
First was 1974's Airport 1975, starring Charlton Heston.
Followed by Airport '77 (1977) starring Jack Lemmon. In this one, art thieves hijack the plane and crash, the plane ending up stuck under water.
And finally, The Concorde... Airport '79
Airport was pretty dry, overall, and the characters were two-dimensional plot devices. The novel is more interesting as an inside look at the functioning of an airport, but written in layman's terms. If the subject is something you want to know more about, Airport is a good read. Otherwise you'll likely be bored.
Bestselling novels of 1968:
1. Airport by Arthur Hailey
2. Couples by John Updike
3. The Salzburg Connection by Helen MacInnes
4. A Small Town in Germany by John le Carré
5. Testimony of Two Men by Taylor Caldwell
6. Preserve and Protect by Allen Drury
7. Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal
8. Vanished by Fletcher Knebel
9. Christy by Catherine Marshall
10. The Tower of Babel by Morris West
Also published in 1968:
Arthur C. Clarke - 2001: A Space Odyssey
Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - Cancer Ward
Monday, April 7, 2014
1967: The Arrangement by Elia Kazan
The Author:
Elia Kazan (1909-2003) was born Elias Kazantzoglou in Istanbul, which at that time was part of the Ottoman Empire, although he was ethnically Greek. His parents emigrated to the United States when Kazan was four. His mother came from a family of cotton merchants, and his father was sold rugs. Kazan attended public school and put himself through college, eventually attending the Yale University School of Drama. He moved to New York and joined the Group Theater. He made a name for himself as a stage director, directing plays like Miller's Death of a Salesman, Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, and Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.
In 1947, Kazan was one of the founders of the Actors Studio, among whose first students were Marlon Brando and James Dean. Kazan cast Brando in the the theater production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
In the mid-1940's Kazan began his career as a film director. In 1951, he cast Marlon Brando as the lead in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, and again in the 1954 film On the Waterfront. He introduced the American public to James Dean in 1955's East of Eden. He won two best director Oscars, one for 1947's Gentleman's Agreement and one for On the Waterfront. He was nominated for two others and in 1999 was presented with a lifetime achievement Oscar. This award caused some controversy.
Kazan became a controversial figure in 1952, when he cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee. This led to his being ostracized from the film community.
In 1967, Kazan published his first novel, The Arrangement. He went on to publish four more novels and two autobiographies. He died of natural causes in 2003.
The Book:
Length: 544 pages
Subject/Genre: Self-discovery/Realism
The Arrangement is a first person account by its protagonist, Eddie Anderson, a successful advertising executive. The novel begins with Eddie explaining how he came to drive his car directly into a passing truck, seemingly against his will. The narrator jumps around for a bit, explaining his relationship with his loyal but bland wife, Florence, his product-of-the-times adopted daughter, Ellen, and his mistress Gwen. We learn that Eddie has always had women on the side, and that there was an assumed 'arrangement' between himself and Florence. But Eddie falls in love with Gwen and becomes increasingly disillusioned with his life as an executive. He starts destroying his professional and personal relationships and ends up with an ultimatum from Florence.
The prose is often presented as a sort of extended monologue, where the narrator is recounting events that have already occurred and the diction is as someone speaking (full of "I mean"s and "anyway"s, etc). The narrative voice is handled very well, moving closer and farther from the action to maintain a strong pace.
The narrator is in many ways sympathetic, but in many ways off-putting. As he says himself, "I could not get interested, not honestly, in anyone else's troubles. I know it's disgusting, but that's the truth." It's no coincidence that Eddie and his wife read Hesse's Siddhartha together. Eddie is a self-centered man who has compromised his ambitions for financial success and stability, and must go on a journey to rediscover himself. He's a character I can feel sympathy towards, but one who, if I met in person, I would not expect to like. Like contemporaries John Updike and Philip Roth, Kazan portrays a very frank view of sex and promiscuity, including two pages of the narrator discussing his own penis.
Kazan wrote and directed a film version of The Arrangement, which was released in 1969 and starred Kirk Douglas as Eddie Anderson and Faye Dunaway as Gwen.
I really liked this novel. As much as the mid-life crisis/rediscovering yourself story-line has been done again and again and again, Kazan does it extremely well. If you require a likable protagonist, you probably won't enjoy Eddie Anderson, but if you can put up with him I strongly suggest checking out The Arrangement.
Bestselling Novels of 1967:
1. The Arrangement by Elia Kazan
2. The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
3. The Chosen by Chaim Potok
4. Topaz by Leon Uris
5. Christy by Catherine Marshall
6. The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder
7. Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin
8. The Plot by Irving Wallace
9. The Gabriel Hounds by Mary Stewart
10. The Exhibitionist by Henry Sutton
Also published in 1967:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
S. E. Hinton - The Outsiders
Robert E. Howard - Conan the Barbarian
Anna Kavan - Ice
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Cancer Ward
Sources:
"Elia Kazan." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Literature Resource Center. Web.
Kazan, Elia. The Arrangement. New York: Stein and Day, 1967. Print.
Elia Kazan (1909-2003) was born Elias Kazantzoglou in Istanbul, which at that time was part of the Ottoman Empire, although he was ethnically Greek. His parents emigrated to the United States when Kazan was four. His mother came from a family of cotton merchants, and his father was sold rugs. Kazan attended public school and put himself through college, eventually attending the Yale University School of Drama. He moved to New York and joined the Group Theater. He made a name for himself as a stage director, directing plays like Miller's Death of a Salesman, Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, and Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.
In 1947, Kazan was one of the founders of the Actors Studio, among whose first students were Marlon Brando and James Dean. Kazan cast Brando in the the theater production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
In the mid-1940's Kazan began his career as a film director. In 1951, he cast Marlon Brando as the lead in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, and again in the 1954 film On the Waterfront. He introduced the American public to James Dean in 1955's East of Eden. He won two best director Oscars, one for 1947's Gentleman's Agreement and one for On the Waterfront. He was nominated for two others and in 1999 was presented with a lifetime achievement Oscar. This award caused some controversy.
Kazan became a controversial figure in 1952, when he cooperated with the House Un-American Activities Committee. This led to his being ostracized from the film community.
In 1967, Kazan published his first novel, The Arrangement. He went on to publish four more novels and two autobiographies. He died of natural causes in 2003.
The Book:
Length: 544 pages
Subject/Genre: Self-discovery/Realism
The Arrangement is a first person account by its protagonist, Eddie Anderson, a successful advertising executive. The novel begins with Eddie explaining how he came to drive his car directly into a passing truck, seemingly against his will. The narrator jumps around for a bit, explaining his relationship with his loyal but bland wife, Florence, his product-of-the-times adopted daughter, Ellen, and his mistress Gwen. We learn that Eddie has always had women on the side, and that there was an assumed 'arrangement' between himself and Florence. But Eddie falls in love with Gwen and becomes increasingly disillusioned with his life as an executive. He starts destroying his professional and personal relationships and ends up with an ultimatum from Florence.
The prose is often presented as a sort of extended monologue, where the narrator is recounting events that have already occurred and the diction is as someone speaking (full of "I mean"s and "anyway"s, etc). The narrative voice is handled very well, moving closer and farther from the action to maintain a strong pace.
The narrator is in many ways sympathetic, but in many ways off-putting. As he says himself, "I could not get interested, not honestly, in anyone else's troubles. I know it's disgusting, but that's the truth." It's no coincidence that Eddie and his wife read Hesse's Siddhartha together. Eddie is a self-centered man who has compromised his ambitions for financial success and stability, and must go on a journey to rediscover himself. He's a character I can feel sympathy towards, but one who, if I met in person, I would not expect to like. Like contemporaries John Updike and Philip Roth, Kazan portrays a very frank view of sex and promiscuity, including two pages of the narrator discussing his own penis.
Kazan wrote and directed a film version of The Arrangement, which was released in 1969 and starred Kirk Douglas as Eddie Anderson and Faye Dunaway as Gwen.
I really liked this novel. As much as the mid-life crisis/rediscovering yourself story-line has been done again and again and again, Kazan does it extremely well. If you require a likable protagonist, you probably won't enjoy Eddie Anderson, but if you can put up with him I strongly suggest checking out The Arrangement.
Bestselling Novels of 1967:
1. The Arrangement by Elia Kazan
2. The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
3. The Chosen by Chaim Potok
4. Topaz by Leon Uris
5. Christy by Catherine Marshall
6. The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder
7. Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin
8. The Plot by Irving Wallace
9. The Gabriel Hounds by Mary Stewart
10. The Exhibitionist by Henry Sutton
Also published in 1967:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude
S. E. Hinton - The Outsiders
Robert E. Howard - Conan the Barbarian
Anna Kavan - Ice
Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - The Cancer Ward
Sources:
"Elia Kazan." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2004. Literature Resource Center. Web.
Kazan, Elia. The Arrangement. New York: Stein and Day, 1967. Print.
Monday, March 24, 2014
1966: Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
The Author:
Jacqueline Susann (1918-1974) was born in Philadelphia to a painter and a schoolteacher. After graduating high school, Susann left to New York City to pursue a career as an actor, landing a series of bit parts on film, television and the stage, eventually landing a steady gig on stage. In New York, she met press agent Irving Mansfield, who she married in 1939. Mansfield went on to manage her career and made sure that she appeared in the papers. Susann got a recurring part on The Morey Amsterdam Show and landed bigger stage roles.
Susann's reputation, however, was tarnished with love affairs. This included Joe Lewis, a comedian and singer. When Mansfield was drafted to the US military in 1943, Susann filed for separation and planned to marry Lewis. Lewis, however, signed up for a USO tour and ended the affair. Susann and Mansfield reunited in 1944. In 1946, they had a son they named Guy. Guy was autistic and was sent to an institution as young child. The most recent article with any authority I could find was dated 1983, and at that time Guy was still institutionalized.
Susann continued to have a career in television, including hosting her own short-lived talk show. In 1962, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. In 1963, she published her first book, Every Night, Josephine! to commercial success. In 1966 she published her most successful novel, Valley of the Dolls. The book was critically panned. Susann became a celebrity author and in 1969 ended up in a public feud with Truman Capote, both insulting each other on television.
In 1973, Susann was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. The disease killed her in 1974.
The Book:
Length: 442 pages
Subject/Genre: Women's issues/Roman a Clef
I just want to put this up front: I did not like this book. Valley of the Dolls focuses on three women trying to make it in New York City, and for all its heavy-handed pro-independence messages, the women are unlikable and almost insultingly two-dimensional. The novel is split into three sections, the first focusing on Anne Welles. Welles comes from a small town to make a life for herself in New York City. She's beautiful and wants to fall in love. That last sentence is the sum of her character. Susann consistently relies upon what is one of my biggest pet peeves in writing. I'm sure you've heard the old advice, show don't tell. Screw that advice, but don't tell me one thing, show me another, and expect me to believe both. Other characters and even the narrator will state qualities about Anne's character, but Anne never exhibits any of these qualities! We're told she's standoffish, but she's consistently a pushover. We're told she's a remarkable secretary, but at that point the only task we've seen her perform was completed by someone else, in this case, Allen Cooper, the millionaire who fell in love with her.
That's another problem with Anne. She never solves her own problems. She comes to New York, and is immediately given a good job because she's so beautiful. One could argue that this is a criticism of the shallowness of society, or that she's judged exclusively by her looks, but this argument would carry a lot more weight if Anne were not a complete Mary Sue with no personality of her own. In my research I came across a review of the book by Nora Ephron which is relevant here: "Valley had a message that had a magnetic appeal for women readers: it described the standard female fantasy--of going to the big city, striking it rich, meeting fabulous men--and went on to show every reader that she was far better off than the heroines in the book--who took pills, killed themselves, and made general messes of their lives."
While the 'dolls' in the title refers to barbiturates, it can just as well refer to the characters, not just in the sense that they are seen as objects in a male-dominated world, but in the sense that they are vacant approximations of women for the reader to project a personality onto. However, it's this very mirror-like effect, along with the controversy, that made the book so popular.
A film version was released in 1967, starring Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate, and Patty Duke. The film, like the book, was a commercial success and a critical failure.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the movie is that the original screenplay (which was later revised to give it a happier ending) was written by SF demi-god Harlan Ellison, who is a significant figure in the Spec-Fic movement whose screenwriting credits include The Outer Limits and Star Trek (his episode of the latter went on to win a Hugo Award). I realize this is tangential, but it's always strange to see a writer who's a huge deal in one field write a movie in a completely different field, especially when the movie turns out badly (which may be why Ellison remained uncredited).
Also notable was the would-be sequel, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which ended up as a satire of the source material, and is one of the three films that Roger Ebert helped write (the other two being Up! (1976) and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979)).
Look, this isn't a well-written book. It's characters are flat and with no personalities of their own, the writing is rife with rhetorical questions to hammer in the point just made, because subtlety isn't a concern. If your looking for a book about the position of women in the 20th century, read Breakfast at Tiffany's. Read The Bell Jar. Read Mrs. Dalloway. Read Nightwood. Read A Visit From the Goon Squad. Read The Hours. The fact is, this is a pretty poor book, and one that's tedious and frustrating to read if you ever stop to think about something as simple as character motivation.
Bestsellers of 1966:
1. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
2. The Adventurers by Harold Robbins
3. The Secret of Santa Vittoria by Robert Crichton
4. Capable of Honor by Allen Drury
5. The Double Image by Helen MacInnes
6. The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
7. Tell No Man by Adela Rogers St. Johns
8. Tai-Pan by James Clavell
9. The Embezzler by Louis Auchincloss
10. All in the Family by Edwin O'Connor
Also Published in 1966:
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Truman Capote - In Cold Blood
John Fowles - The Magus
Robert Heinlein - The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
William Styron - The Confessions of Nat Turner
Anne Sexton - Live or Die
Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
Hunter S. Thompson - Hell's Angels
Sources:
"Jacqueline Susann." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource
Center. Web.
Jacqueline Susann (1918-1974) was born in Philadelphia to a painter and a schoolteacher. After graduating high school, Susann left to New York City to pursue a career as an actor, landing a series of bit parts on film, television and the stage, eventually landing a steady gig on stage. In New York, she met press agent Irving Mansfield, who she married in 1939. Mansfield went on to manage her career and made sure that she appeared in the papers. Susann got a recurring part on The Morey Amsterdam Show and landed bigger stage roles.
Susann's reputation, however, was tarnished with love affairs. This included Joe Lewis, a comedian and singer. When Mansfield was drafted to the US military in 1943, Susann filed for separation and planned to marry Lewis. Lewis, however, signed up for a USO tour and ended the affair. Susann and Mansfield reunited in 1944. In 1946, they had a son they named Guy. Guy was autistic and was sent to an institution as young child. The most recent article with any authority I could find was dated 1983, and at that time Guy was still institutionalized.
Susann continued to have a career in television, including hosting her own short-lived talk show. In 1962, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. In 1963, she published her first book, Every Night, Josephine! to commercial success. In 1966 she published her most successful novel, Valley of the Dolls. The book was critically panned. Susann became a celebrity author and in 1969 ended up in a public feud with Truman Capote, both insulting each other on television.
In 1973, Susann was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. The disease killed her in 1974.
The Book:
Length: 442 pages
Subject/Genre: Women's issues/Roman a Clef
I just want to put this up front: I did not like this book. Valley of the Dolls focuses on three women trying to make it in New York City, and for all its heavy-handed pro-independence messages, the women are unlikable and almost insultingly two-dimensional. The novel is split into three sections, the first focusing on Anne Welles. Welles comes from a small town to make a life for herself in New York City. She's beautiful and wants to fall in love. That last sentence is the sum of her character. Susann consistently relies upon what is one of my biggest pet peeves in writing. I'm sure you've heard the old advice, show don't tell. Screw that advice, but don't tell me one thing, show me another, and expect me to believe both. Other characters and even the narrator will state qualities about Anne's character, but Anne never exhibits any of these qualities! We're told she's standoffish, but she's consistently a pushover. We're told she's a remarkable secretary, but at that point the only task we've seen her perform was completed by someone else, in this case, Allen Cooper, the millionaire who fell in love with her.
That's another problem with Anne. She never solves her own problems. She comes to New York, and is immediately given a good job because she's so beautiful. One could argue that this is a criticism of the shallowness of society, or that she's judged exclusively by her looks, but this argument would carry a lot more weight if Anne were not a complete Mary Sue with no personality of her own. In my research I came across a review of the book by Nora Ephron which is relevant here: "Valley had a message that had a magnetic appeal for women readers: it described the standard female fantasy--of going to the big city, striking it rich, meeting fabulous men--and went on to show every reader that she was far better off than the heroines in the book--who took pills, killed themselves, and made general messes of their lives."
While the 'dolls' in the title refers to barbiturates, it can just as well refer to the characters, not just in the sense that they are seen as objects in a male-dominated world, but in the sense that they are vacant approximations of women for the reader to project a personality onto. However, it's this very mirror-like effect, along with the controversy, that made the book so popular.
A film version was released in 1967, starring Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate, and Patty Duke. The film, like the book, was a commercial success and a critical failure.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the movie is that the original screenplay (which was later revised to give it a happier ending) was written by SF demi-god Harlan Ellison, who is a significant figure in the Spec-Fic movement whose screenwriting credits include The Outer Limits and Star Trek (his episode of the latter went on to win a Hugo Award). I realize this is tangential, but it's always strange to see a writer who's a huge deal in one field write a movie in a completely different field, especially when the movie turns out badly (which may be why Ellison remained uncredited).
Also notable was the would-be sequel, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), which ended up as a satire of the source material, and is one of the three films that Roger Ebert helped write (the other two being Up! (1976) and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979)).
Look, this isn't a well-written book. It's characters are flat and with no personalities of their own, the writing is rife with rhetorical questions to hammer in the point just made, because subtlety isn't a concern. If your looking for a book about the position of women in the 20th century, read Breakfast at Tiffany's. Read The Bell Jar. Read Mrs. Dalloway. Read Nightwood. Read A Visit From the Goon Squad. Read The Hours. The fact is, this is a pretty poor book, and one that's tedious and frustrating to read if you ever stop to think about something as simple as character motivation.
Bestsellers of 1966:
1. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
2. The Adventurers by Harold Robbins
3. The Secret of Santa Vittoria by Robert Crichton
4. Capable of Honor by Allen Drury
5. The Double Image by Helen MacInnes
6. The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
7. Tell No Man by Adela Rogers St. Johns
8. Tai-Pan by James Clavell
9. The Embezzler by Louis Auchincloss
10. All in the Family by Edwin O'Connor
Also Published in 1966:
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita
Truman Capote - In Cold Blood
John Fowles - The Magus
Robert Heinlein - The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Daniel Keyes - Flowers for Algernon
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49
William Styron - The Confessions of Nat Turner
Anne Sexton - Live or Die
Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
Hunter S. Thompson - Hell's Angels
Sources:
"Jacqueline Susann." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource
Center. Web.
Monday, March 10, 2014
1965: The Source by James Michener
The Author:
James Michener (1907-1997) was adopted by a Quaker from Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He attended Swarthmore college for English and psychology, graduating with honors in 1929. After a couple years spent abroad, Michener returned to Pennsylvania to teach high school English. In 1935, he married his first wife, Patti Koon, then earned his Masters and taught briefly at Harvard before becoming an editor for Macmillan Publishers.
Michener served in the South Pacific during WWII. His experiences there provided the basis for his first novel, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1948 and was adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the stage, under the title South Pacific. In 1948, Michener divorced Koon and married Vange Nord. Michener appeared in the top 10 annual bestsellers list twice in the 1950s, and fifteen times over the course of his life, taking the top spot four times. In 1955, he divorced Nord and married Mari Sabusawa. In 1977, Michener recieved the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died of kidney failure in 1997.
The Book:
Length: 909 pages
Subject/Genre: Israel/Historical Fiction
The Source starts with a crew of archaeologists arriving at a dig site in Israel. This archaeological dig serves as the frame narrative for a story that spans about five thousand years, starting in the Stone Age and the move towards an agricultural society up through the creation of the modern nation of Israel.
Michener's writing reminds me a lot of Irving Stone's, but whereas Stone novelizes the biography of individuals, Michener writes the biography of regions. He does have some of the same problems as Stone, most importantly the rather dry prose. The Source is exhaustively researched, and at many times reads more like non-fiction or a history textbook than a novel.
This is the second novel about Israel on my list (not counting the novels that take place at or around the time of the Jesus), the first being Uris's Exodus, which is also based on exhaustive research. Israel is still a hot topic today.
The Source is one of only a handful of novels so far on my list to have not had a film adaptation. In this case, it's not surprising. The Source functions in many ways like a novel in stories, that is to say, a novel comprised of a number of connected short stories.
The Source is pretty darn long, which seems to be typical of Michener's work. I feel that part of this is due to the novel's function as a history book, where details and explanations that are not really necessary for the story, or even slow the story down, are included for a sense of historical completeness. This can be interesting, if at times a bit annoying.
Overall, if you are interested in religious history or historical fiction, The Source is a good, if long, book for you.
Bestselling Novels of 1965:
1. The Source by James Michener
2. Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman
3. Herzog by Saul Bellow
4. The Looking Glass War by John le Carré
5. The Green Berets by Robin Moore
6. Those Who Love by Irving Stone
7. The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming
8. Hotel by Arthur Hailey
9. The Ambassador by Morris West
10. Don't Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk
Also Published in 1966:
Frank Herbert - Dune
Jerzy Kosinski - The Painted Bird
Sources:
Michener, James. The Source. New York: Random House, 1965. Print.
James Michener (1907-1997) was adopted by a Quaker from Doylestown, Pennsylvania. He attended Swarthmore college for English and psychology, graduating with honors in 1929. After a couple years spent abroad, Michener returned to Pennsylvania to teach high school English. In 1935, he married his first wife, Patti Koon, then earned his Masters and taught briefly at Harvard before becoming an editor for Macmillan Publishers.
Michener served in the South Pacific during WWII. His experiences there provided the basis for his first novel, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1948 and was adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the stage, under the title South Pacific. In 1948, Michener divorced Koon and married Vange Nord. Michener appeared in the top 10 annual bestsellers list twice in the 1950s, and fifteen times over the course of his life, taking the top spot four times. In 1955, he divorced Nord and married Mari Sabusawa. In 1977, Michener recieved the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died of kidney failure in 1997.
The Book:
Length: 909 pages
Subject/Genre: Israel/Historical Fiction
The Source starts with a crew of archaeologists arriving at a dig site in Israel. This archaeological dig serves as the frame narrative for a story that spans about five thousand years, starting in the Stone Age and the move towards an agricultural society up through the creation of the modern nation of Israel.
Michener's writing reminds me a lot of Irving Stone's, but whereas Stone novelizes the biography of individuals, Michener writes the biography of regions. He does have some of the same problems as Stone, most importantly the rather dry prose. The Source is exhaustively researched, and at many times reads more like non-fiction or a history textbook than a novel.
This is the second novel about Israel on my list (not counting the novels that take place at or around the time of the Jesus), the first being Uris's Exodus, which is also based on exhaustive research. Israel is still a hot topic today.
The Source is one of only a handful of novels so far on my list to have not had a film adaptation. In this case, it's not surprising. The Source functions in many ways like a novel in stories, that is to say, a novel comprised of a number of connected short stories.
The Source is pretty darn long, which seems to be typical of Michener's work. I feel that part of this is due to the novel's function as a history book, where details and explanations that are not really necessary for the story, or even slow the story down, are included for a sense of historical completeness. This can be interesting, if at times a bit annoying.
Overall, if you are interested in religious history or historical fiction, The Source is a good, if long, book for you.
Bestselling Novels of 1965:
1. The Source by James Michener
2. Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman
3. Herzog by Saul Bellow
4. The Looking Glass War by John le Carré
5. The Green Berets by Robin Moore
6. Those Who Love by Irving Stone
7. The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming
8. Hotel by Arthur Hailey
9. The Ambassador by Morris West
10. Don't Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk
Also Published in 1966:
Frank Herbert - Dune
Jerzy Kosinski - The Painted Bird
Sources:
Michener, James. The Source. New York: Random House, 1965. Print.
Sunday, March 2, 2014
A Change of Schedule
Unfortunately, due to coursework, I'll have to switch back to an every-other-week posting schedule for main book reviews. My review of James Michener's The Source will be posted next Monday.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)