Word: authorly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Atlantic Monthly, historian Douglas Brinkley deflates the myth that Kerouac pounded out On the Road in a three-week burst of manic energy sustained by jazz and Benzedrine. After sifting through documents to which he was recently granted access by Kerouac's estate, Brinkley reveals that the author, who died in 1969, actually planned, plotted and outlined his homage to nomadic nonconformity well before writing the novel's final draft in 1951. Kerouac said he wanted to write as fast as he could because the "road is fast." Apparently, it is also paved, landscaped and banked...
...pair of 14-year-old identical twins, Leah and Adah, are the author's most vivid characters. Leah is a thoughtful, idealistic beauty who at first idolizes her father, then sees through his pious bluster. Adah, crippled at birth, is a wry, inward-turning genius who refuses to speak but silently reshapes the world in bitter palindromes: "amen enema," and "evil, all; its sin is still alive...
...offer Nathan Price's patriarchal troublemaking as an example in miniature of historical white exploitation of black Africa. Kingsolver, 43, lived in the Congo in the early '60s, and fondly remembers the people and the terrain. But this is a novel, not travel writing salted with guilt. The author's strong female characterizations carry a story that moves through its first half like a river in flood...
...particular, is so patient and virtuous that he seems--cultural bias alert here--almost Christlike. Perhaps that is because unlike the women, whose thoughts we hear, the men are observed only from the outside. It is also true that the novel's second half is subdued in tone. The author has made her point, and the rest is told almost as afterword. The rapacious Mobutu Sese Seko is in power, thanks to U.S. influence. And the Price women, their calamitous adventure mostly behind them, do what people do: get married, or not; follow a profession, or not; grow older...
This is John Updike's third go-round with "the semi-obscure American author" Henry Bech. Bech at Bay (Knopf; 241 pages; $23) displays the same mordantly comic look at the literary life that enlivened Bech: A Book (1970) and Bech Is Back (1982). The five stories that make up this new installment of the saga show an older and grumpier Bech still worrying about his long bouts of writer's block and finding ways of getting away from his desk whenever he can. On a State Department-sponsored junket to communist Prague in the mid-1980s, Bech meets dissident...