Word: authored
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...means a risk-free choice," Hamilton said, but recalled the plea of Costa Rican President Oscar Arias, author of the peace plan, that Congress "take a risk for peace." The five-nation peace agreement was signed...
...narrator and central figure, who has the same name as the author, is weak on men and money, strong on children and survival. She is 40 or so and a fierce lover of her layabout poet Leo, a cashiered college professor. She wants to write and also likes to smoke a little dope. In the meantime, she keeps the necessary $50 ahead of perdition (banked under the rug of the one- room roach farm she shares with Leo and her grown son Morgani) by soldiering for an office-temporaries outfit...
...again. Even when the narrator's brain- dazed brother, an outlaw biker, kills a man in a brawl -- something happens here, certainly -- the fact comes out only as an aside, as part of a moody, troubling description of his skirmish with a bored psychiatrist at a VA hospital. The author's sound instinct is to play against the dramatic. There is no resolution of the brother's predicament. You are missing the point if you try to watch one chunk of carrot in the roil of this Sleazy Street stew (the phrase is from a country-funk song lyric...
...greatest con artist. Throughout the narrative, nothing is as it seems. Wychwood's employer is an author who, it turns out, has plagiarized her books. His wife works for an art gallery where the paintings are palpable forgeries. Meanwhile, as the narrative flashes forward and back, parallel lies are occurring in other times and places. Meredith is being deceived; so are those who subscribe to the Chatterton myth...
This is not conscious comedy, but at times its humor surpasses anything in Ackroyd's far more appealing and sympathetic work. Yet each author provides the same service: turning the reader back to the damned youth who wrote, "Since all my Vices magnify'd are here,/ She cannot paint me worse than I appear,/ When raving in the Lunacy of ink,/ I catch the Pen and publish what I think." A ghostly presence hovers over both books, and the sound it emits is the ringing echo of the last laugh...