Word: authority
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Purcell's debut feature comes out of the bottom of Beth Henley's script drawer. The author of Crimes of the Heart and (in collaboration) True Stories has down-home flakes down pat, but here they are too pat. Meet -- as if you hadn't met them in Southern literature a hundred times before -- the irrepressible outcast (Rosanna Arquette), the sensitive wanderer (Eric Roberts) in search of Miz Right, the good-ole-girl barmaid (Mare Winningham), the ex-jock with itchy trousers (Jim Youngs). In her eye blink of a role, Winningham is a buoyant delight, and Youngs nicely fleshes...
...novel reads like a breeze, and its strength is Arensberg's spoofing of two ostensibly glamorous worlds, publishing and theater. The author once worked as an editor at Viking Press, and she writes of the industry with affectionate exasperation. There is a wonderful Mad Hatter editorial meeting, propelled by reasoning of the most tangential sort. There are the elusive editors who dread authors as "walking vessels of petty grievance and conceit." An especially funny cameo is Allan Schieffman, the macho editor who boasts to Frances that "Norman Mailer had punched him in the stomach, an affectionate punch, and a tribute...
Forget the business about novellas and stories in the subtitle. Author Andre Dubus' latest collection of short fiction contains six pieces, four of them somewhat longer than the other two. It is Dubus' main title that calls for scrutiny. The Last Worthless Evening is not taken from any of the works included in the book; it alludes instead to a passage from William Faulkner's The Bear that amounts to a dirge for man's despoliation of the New World. In the past, Dubus has called his collections names such as Finding a Girl in America (1980) and The Times...
This statement lacks the demonstrable authenticity that appears so consistently in all of Dubus' fiction, including the stories in this book. Abstract critiques of U.S. society seem puny amid the welter of details and telling observations that the author provides. In Molly, the title character, a 15-year-old girl, goes riding with her new boyfriend toward a beach on the Atlantic. She looks out the window at a succession of small, working-class houses: "In the faces of a group of teenagers who stood under a tree and watched her and Bruce passing, she saw a dullness she thought...
...film, Repentance, by Director Tengiz Abuladze, was screened for select audiences in Moscow and Tbilisi. Blending fact and fantasy, the film conveys the message that the Soviet Union has yet to acknowledge the horrors of Stalinism. In another dramatic first, a spring 1987 publication date was announced for Soviet Author Anatoli Rybakov's The Children of the Arbat, a major novel about the Stalin era in which the dictator himself is a leading character...