Guest, Judith - Guest, Judith 1936–
Guest, Judith 1936–
Guest is an American novelist. Her first book, Ordinary People, was highly acclaimed for its realistic and sensitive portrayal of family relationships. Ordinary People was the first unsolicited novel to be accepted by Viking Press in twenty-seven years.
Ordinary People … is a rather bland and far from ironic novel, yet its title hints at a complicated irony. On the one hand, the book suggests, there are no ordinary people; people are all extraordinary in their way, both finer and feebler than we think. And on the other hand, ordinary people are what we may become, if we can conquer our fear of being extraordinary. In a novel, that fear has to be acted out. In Ordinary People, it is the novel, the trace of a season of exile….
[The] whole novel is subtly implausible … because problems just pop up, get neatly formulated, and vanish, as if they were performing a psychoanalytic morality...
[The entire page is 1261 words long]
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