The Chicago Tribune once described Houston as "a hot, humid, swampy, colorless flatland metropolis that may already be beyond physical or social redemption".
"Because of it the path is made smoother for would-be popular saviours, whose extreme conservatism is carefully concealed beneath a demagogic rhetoric of national renewal and social redemption".
In the so-called proletarian novels of the period, with their evil bosses, downtrodden workers and heroic organizers, labor acquired a kind of romance -- not because the actual tasks were ennobling, but because unions held the key to broader social redemption, generally along doctrinaire socialist lines.
But now, Mr. Levy, a former suit designer turned party-hopping restaurateur, is seeking social redemption as he prepares to open Niko, a much-anticipated — and far more egalitarian — Japanese restaurant in SoHo that he says will be more about the food than the buzz.
Dumas fils is best remembered for his romanticization of the courtesan in La Dame aux camélias (1848; The Lady with the Camellias), the novel and play on which the libretto of Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata was based, but the moralizing Les Idées de Mme Aubray (1867), with its plea for the social redemption of repentant fallen women, is more typical of his major works.
In novels like Sloan Wilson's "Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" and Richard Yates's "Revolutionary Road," work isn't a tool of social redemption but a graveyard of individual dreams -- often, as in the case of Yates's Frank Wheeler, the dream of being an artist.
Victor Hugo's novel wrestles with all kinds of big themes: social injustice, redemption through love, the power of providence.
The message of his writing was always the same: that, amid the malice and falseness of social life, redemption rises from clear speech and childlike enchantment, from all the forms of unself-conscious innocence that still surround us (with the hovering unease that one might mistake emptiness for innocence, as Seymour seems to have done with his Muriel).
This is also a beautifully crafted exploration of social class, justice, redemption and mercy.
Henry was a spiky, unsettling, beautifully performed vignette about love, social pressure and redemption.
Our critic, Sasha Frere-Jones, called this a "confident, poetic" debut, "a primer on African-American social crisis and redemption in the 1990's".
