The strength of the American novel in the period after World War II had something to do with the national atmosphere of breakdown and change: political and social urgencies promoted a quality of urgency in the works of such writers as Mailer, Bellow, Ellison, Heller, and Philip Roth.
Khrushchev was a thoroughgoing political pragmatist who had learned his Marxism by rote, but he never hesitated to adapt his beliefs to the political urgencies of the moment.
The books spawned a mini-genre of fin de siècle fictions about children of nature, splashing in the shallows of Edenic islands, growing sturdy and beautiful and discovering sudden primal urgencies in their maturing bodies when they meet other children of nature (rather than succumbing to exposure, malnutrition and rickets, being eaten by predators or contracting picturesque tropical diseases).
Of a piece with such a view is the popular theory of art as a kind of "play" activity, in which creation and appreciation are divorced from the normal urgencies of existence and surrendered to leisure.
In its most vivid form, the apocalypse (i.e., a visionary disclosure of the future), the literature of the period affords a remarkable insight into the agonies and urgencies of the people (see apocalyptic literature).
("A survivor of the Holocaust gone missing in the murky wastelands and unspoken history of Cold War Europe, René Köhler... .....) About Hatto's musicianship Orga expressed no equivocation: "Even when some of her decisions, her occasional urgencies, are not to my taste, there's a rightness, an honesty, to her recorded playing..
When "O Canada" was sung before the play (very atypically for the country), he stood and sang loudly and clearly, and then, when the play began, while all around him the other wine-and-lamb-filled spectators dozed and nodded, he kept his eyes fixed unblinkingly ahead on the stony tragedy of the urgencies of ambition and the ambiguities of power in a small country to the north.
Doesn't endlessly retelling the story of the murder of the Jews of Europe let us give ourselves the appearance of moral seriousness while immunizing us to the urgencies of actual moral seriousness?
For a little while, Rose and Albert abandoned all urgencies, except those of a cell of two.
In real life, then, the urgencies of 2013 will take over from the important 2014 stuff.
It is in and around this lane that the novel leisurely unfolds, with its intermittent, small-scale urgencies, with the children's kite-flying and cricket playing, their tentative romances and grudges, their variety shows and bike riding, all heightened by their ignorance of the encroaching violence.
