![]() ![]() Take the character Menardo, proud owner of a new bulletproof vest, the owner’s manual of which is his bedside book. Her personages are American Indians, loaded down with legend that affects them much more than the common-sense mercantile wisdom of so-called Western civilization. In her second novel (after “Ceremony” in 1977, which won her the double-edged accolade “the most accomplished Indian writer of her generation”), she hauls together tectonic plates called America, Mexico, Africa, “The Fifth World,” and concludes with a homemade synthesis entitled “One World, Many Tribes.” She creates with a free, impassioned hand, keenly aware of terrain, history and that bedeviling paradox known as the past in the present. Forster must have felt this when he spoke of some enormous thing looming down the road, “a solid mass ahead,” though he himself never attempted the mega-novel. There is surely something godlike in concocting “Remembrance of Things Past” or “Finnegans Wake” that you might feel in only a minor way if concocting “Death in Venice” or “Candide.” E. The longer my own novels get, the more I sympathize with novelists writing blockbusters, and I do so because the massive novel models itself not on the vast universe, our huge planet, our big continents, but on the grandiose behavior of the Creator of all things. ![]()
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