Word: authorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...strongly affected by environmental factors--leaves room for a large genetic component. Few Ashkenazi Jews, I suspect, would trade their genes for a random draw from the gene pool, whatever their fear of colon cancer and whatever they may have felt (and said) about Charles Murray, notorious co-author of The Bell Curve...
...DeLillo's 10th novel, Mao II, features a famously reclusive author named Bill Gray who finally goes public, with unhappy consequences. Now DeLillo, not a recluse but visibly wary in the presence of cameras and interviewers, stands braced to face a lot of both during a seven-city tour to promote his new novel, Underworld (Scribner; 827 pages; $27.50). "My publisher has worked very hard on this book," he says, explaining his willingness to go on the road. "I do feel I'm entering some self-replicating white space, where the distinction between working and living has been erased." Reminded...
...Kelley is the famously prying celebrity biographer whose works include His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra, which alleged that the singer's mother was an abortionist, and Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography, which alleged that the former First Lady and Sinatra enjoyed a White House dalliance. The author's latest is a multigenerational saga about the House of Windsor, promising dirt on everyone from King George V to the late Princess of Wales. The catch--or the break, depending on your point of view--is Diana's accidental death just three weeks before the book's publication date...
Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake (Putnam; 219 pages; $23.95) is a salvage job, a reprocessing of what the author calls the "best parts" of an unpublished novel that did not work. This revision is a mix of autobiographical bits, plot concepts, barbershop cynicism and romantic idealism, all loosely tied together by a standard science-fiction device: on Feb. 13, 2001, a quirk in space-time flips the calendar back 10 years to Feb. 17, 1991. From that moment, everyone in the world is fated to repeat the decade in every living detail...
Without a driving story, Timequake depends entirely on the author's familiar tone of weary bemusement, at times attributed to Kilgore Trout, the fictional writer who has been Vonnegut's unaltered ego in previous novels. The connection between fiction and fact is readily apparent. Trout spends the rerun rewriting My Ten Years on Automatic Pilot. Vonnegut, who took nearly a decade to complete his aborted book, works through that same material again...