Like his other novels, it is a work of great violence, describing characters of unbridled instincts and passions.
Nonetheless, the cumulative effect of describing characters in traditional novel fashion may indeed, as postmodernists assert, offer a specious form of reassurance, by implying the existence of a contained and orderly universe.
Styron spent seven weeks in hospital, and returned home with an enhanced understanding that his father, too, had struggled with "the gorgon", and been hospitalised, and that throughout his novels he had been describing characters who were suffering from depression.
Before "The Librarian," Mr. Beinhart wrote "American Hero," the novel that became the movie "Wag the Dog". In both books he is better at imagining outrageous plots that slyly allude to current politics than he is at describing characters or situations (that's one reason "Wag the Dog" is so much better than the book behind it).
But he never repeated the acclaim or the influence that accrued to his first works of fiction, which were published in the late 1950s and led critics to group him with the so-called angry young men, writers like Kingsley Amis, John Braine, John Wain and the playwright John Osborne who were also describing characters in revolt against the British class system.
Where the promised future Highbridge novels would benefit from attention is in the narrative prose, which has some clunky chimes ("going to be going") and can, when describing characters, sound like those chatty capsule sketches provided in TV treatments: "One-time carpet king on the High Street, now retired and restoring vintage tractors".
Also, the use of landscape indicators for describing character and assessing changes has been widely tested.
Amber and Kyle are both really well described characters as well.
It describes characters that represent the realization of our fears of the future.
If you demand meat-and-potatoes songs that describe characters, situations and events, "Phantom Moon" will seem maddeningly indirect.
We use the phrase "cartoon cutout" to describe characters who lack the rich individuality of well-rounded literary creations.
