The Graduate

Rating:
Summary: A WONDERFUL STORY WITH CATCHY DIALOGUE
Review: THE DIALOGUE IN THIS BOOK IS LIKE NO OTHER. THE MOVIE IS MUCH LIKE THE BOOK AND BOTH ARE HIGHLY ENJOYABLE.

Rating:
Summary: Doesn't graduate
Review: The movie "The Graduate" is a modern cinematic classic of changing worldviews and morals. But the book it's based on is only a classic because the movie is. You know those books that are so simple you can read them in one afternoon? "The Graduate" is so simple you could write it in one afternoon.

Ben Braddock is the graduate, a young man from a good family who has just finished college. By his family's expectations, he should now go on to a good graduate school and then to a good career. But Ben doesn't really have any ambitions, and isn't sure what he wants to do with his life. He's cynical and depressed, unwilling to go in any one direction.

Then he meets Mrs. Robinson, the seductive wife of his father's best friend, and a woman old enough to be his mother.Though Benjamin is initially reluctant, Mrs. Robinson has some idea of what Ben is feeling. She lures him into an affair, which goes very awry when he meets Elaine Robinson, his lover's daughter -- and falls for her.

Charles Webb seems to be shooting for a biting, witty look at the stagnated culture of the 1960s, and how that culture turned itself inside out with rapid, bewildering changes in morals and worldviews. The problem is, this book is neither biting nor witty. Some parts of it are amusing, but it's impossible to get into the story. As a social commentary, it makes its point. But as a novel, it's a failure.

It's hard to really get into a book when it's written like a screenplay. Unfortunately, Charles Webb's style is less like an author and more like a screenwriter. Minimal description, basic dialogue, and a few bloodless descriptions of the characters' actions; even the sex scenes are ice-cold, almost like a step-by-step "how-to" guide for seduction. And the lack of insight into what the characters are thinking or feeling makes most of them feel like cardboard cutouts, just types like "wealthy sexy woman" or "disillusioned youth."

Some authors are able to take the minimalistic approach and make it work. Webb's writing just seems like he was too bored to include further detail. Ben comes across not as a disillusioned youth, but as a spoiled brat who stalks a girl he won't be interested in for long. Elaine is both boring and rather annoying, as she seems willing to marry anybody who asks. Mrs. Robinson is one of the few characters that has a spark of life to her.

Very rarely does a movie outstrip the novel it's based on. But "The Graduate" is one of those. While Webb's book produced a much-beloved cinematic classic, it accomplished nothing more due to its graceless execution and flimsy writing.

Rating:
Summary: They don't get it: it's existential
Review: The other reviewers don't seem to realize that this book is an existential tale. It concerns a person's powerlessness to stop what is happening around them. See also "The Incredible Shrinking Man" for another existential story. The existential movement has pretty well died out (thank God!).

As to the style of writing, I dare anyone to slam this book and praise Hemingway. They are very much alike.

A good book, and similar to the movie (which used most of the dialog). Except for the movie making Carl "the makeout king", it ends the same way.

Rating:
Summary: They don't get it: it's existential
Review: The other reviewers don't seem to realize that this book is an existential tale. It concerns a person's powerlessness to stop what is happening around them. See also "The Incredible Shrinking Man" for another existential story. The existential movement has pretty well died out (thank God!).

As to the style of writing, I dare anyone to slam this book and praise Hemingway. They are very much alike.

A good book, and similar to the movie (which used most of the dialog). Except for the movie making Carl "the makeout king", it ends the same way.

Rating:
Summary: AN ABSOLUTELY STUPID STORY!
Review: Thee novel is stupid and unreal. It's written in an easy language. The whole story is about superficial things, and not about real feelings. We don't like stories which are so far away from our daily life. It can't be reommended to be read. It's not worth reading it We weren't very happy about seeing the film, it was neither boring because the film is quite old nor a "classical" for us. The American way of life is not attractive to us. Why didn't Ben's parents undertake anything against their son bumming around?

Rating:
Summary: Bad writing makes the story secondary.
Review: This book is the exception to my rule that the movies never measure up to the books they are based on. It's difficult to get into this book because the writing is so awful. Charles Webb doesn't know how to write about events or emotions without resorting to making the characters talk about what's going on, which would be fine if the dialogue weren't so boring and repetetive. Webb writes like a foreign student in his second year of of English - commas and question marks are used unevenly, and whenever there is dialogue, it's usually followed by the words "she said," "Benjamin said," "Mrs. Robinson said."

"What is it," Benjamin said. "Some kind of rubber suit?"
Mr. Arnold laughed. "It's a diving suit," he said.
"Oh," Benjamin said, and began returning it to the box.
"You're not through yet," his father said, pulling it back up and holding it. "Keep digging."
"Isn't this exciting," Mrs. Arnold said.

The story itself is good, but I found it hard to concentrate on the book's good points when the writing was so painfully bad. I bought this book at a used book sale and am planning to give it away to a book drive soon.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining
Review: This little novel really is quite good entertainment. Most of the book is just dialogue, reading much like a screenplay, so it is hardly going to rank up there as an all-time great novel. The conversations between Ben and his parents, Ben and Mrs Robinson etc. are tremendously witty, and I found myself laughing out loud on a number of occasions. Ben is a considerably darker character than he appears in the (perhaps superior) film version, being a cynical and disillusioned graduate going through a depression during which he loses interest in just about everything and resigns himself to a life of 'bumming around'. I think I would agree with Douglas Brode, the film critic who wrote of the movie that it was not a story about the generation gap, but rather about a young man who feels as alienated from his own peers as from his parents' generation. This comes across much more strongly in the book, and we also get a very strong sense of WHY he feels so distanced from the rest of his culture - the superficiality and hypocrisy of middle-class America (this is very much a book of its time) is evident, and the reader finds himself disgusted with the shallow attitudes of the milieu in which Benjamin finds himself.

Rating:
Summary: "An Easy Reader"
Review: We had to read the lessons in our English lessons. The teacher decided that we should read „The Graduate" by Charles Webb. The book „The Graduate" is easy to read and to understand. We didn't have a lot of difficultes while we were reading the text because the language used in this novel isn't too hard. The vocabulary is limited. That's what we were „enjoying"! Our opinion is that the content isn't specially good. But there are books which are worse than „The Graduate".

Rating:
Summary: ABSOLUTELY STUPID!
Review: With our English teacher we read this horrible book in class. The whole story is on a very low level. Why did the author write such a stupid, foolish book? Is this his opinion of social life of young people? We hate this book and we'll never read it again. Maybe we have another mentality than Americans have, but we were absolutely shocked. And we couldn't find any humour and we didn't enjoy reading this book. The people in this book are very superficial and have no intention than love, affairs, but they don't know real love. It shows a very bad opinion of people. If people really were like that in reality, what would happen?

Rating:
Summary: Whimsically Witty!
Review: WOW! The Graduate, also a 1968 motion picture, is told in a script-like, straight forward manner which rivets the audience and lures them into a web of entertainment. We are captivated into Ben's life,a seemingly scandous soap opera which dances on the delicate line between trashy and alluring. Ben Braddock, the highly successfuly Graduate, comes home "confused" about his future. He is seduced by an old family friend, Mrs. Robinson, continues the affair, wastes his life bumming around, then falls in love with her daughter, and is determined to marry her. This page turning, eye catching novel makes you want to laugh, cry, and scream with frustration. Dealing with themes such as prevailing love, betrayal, broken friendships, determination, and too much success, this novel is a great all around read. No wonder the movie won so many academy awards!