The quote is Paul Zindel.
I picked up a bunch of fast reads the other day.
One of these was Zindel's play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.
I found myself thinking of Albee, but the comparisons were mostly unfavorable ones. This read like the work of an Albee epigonus. I did not know until I read Zindel's online bio just now that he actually was mentored by Albee.
It's not a bad play. It just feels too much like a play modeled after other plays, and perhaps it did not feel all that contemporary, even when it debuted to acclaim at the very beginning of the seventies. Think Eugene O'Neill territory long after the fact. Think Long Day's Journey into Night Lite. Yet it won Zindel the Pulitzer. He claims in the introduction to have authored the play at twenty-five. He won the Pulitzer when he was roughly a decade older than that.
Zindel is probably most well-known for his many YA novels, many of which were regarded as controversial and which were often challenged in the schools by the censorious-minded, even up through the nineties. This seems silly, as it's evident he's as well-loved and useful as Judy Blume to that age group of readers.
He died at sixty-six or doubtless he would by now have published a hundred novels. Because he managed to publish fifty-three and he died at sixty-six.
I picked up a bunch of fast reads the other day.
One of these was Zindel's play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds.
I found myself thinking of Albee, but the comparisons were mostly unfavorable ones. This read like the work of an Albee epigonus. I did not know until I read Zindel's online bio just now that he actually was mentored by Albee.
It's not a bad play. It just feels too much like a play modeled after other plays, and perhaps it did not feel all that contemporary, even when it debuted to acclaim at the very beginning of the seventies. Think Eugene O'Neill territory long after the fact. Think Long Day's Journey into Night Lite. Yet it won Zindel the Pulitzer. He claims in the introduction to have authored the play at twenty-five. He won the Pulitzer when he was roughly a decade older than that.
Zindel is probably most well-known for his many YA novels, many of which were regarded as controversial and which were often challenged in the schools by the censorious-minded, even up through the nineties. This seems silly, as it's evident he's as well-loved and useful as Judy Blume to that age group of readers.
He died at sixty-six or doubtless he would by now have published a hundred novels. Because he managed to publish fifty-three and he died at sixty-six.
No comments:
Post a Comment