Word: authorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...burrowings of a suspected mole, but the real story, and a good one, is whether Jericho can track Enigma through the deep space of his own brain before he melts to ash. Great mathematical ability remains a snark that can't really be hunted in a novel, but the author provides what is possible, the illusion of understanding as an unearthly mind reaches for patterns in a mist of numbers...
BLAME IT ALL ON JEAN-JACQUES Rousseau, whose Confessions shocked 18th century France with its author's admissions of sexual masochism and other private deviancies. The great philosopher didn't just help start the French Revolution with his writings; he ushered in a publishing genre--the confessional memoir. More than 200 years later the literary form is thriving. Not just the celebrity memoir in which show-biz and sports icons "tell all" about the pain behind the fame. More recently has come a flood of what might be called just-plain-folks memoirs--intensely personal yet highly literary accounts...
...following the mysterious disappearance of his father, who had been sent to jail for embezzlement. The writing is stripped-down Dostoyevsky ("My head itched. Cold sweat ran down my flesh...."), the overall effect as unnerving and oddly exhilarating as the life of a secret thief apparently was for the author...
Prairie Reunion by Barbara J. Scot (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 230 pages; $21) is a bittersweet homecoming story tracing the author's return in middle age to the puritannical farming community where she grew up. In Scotch Grove, Iowa, she tries to piece together the puzzle of her mother's loving stoicism in the face of her father's humiliating desertion and subsequent suicide. Structured as a patchwork of conversations, childhood recollections and lyrical encounters with the land, Scot's quietly earnest quest yields her valuable understanding of her mother's reticence and a deeper appreciation of the mysteries of family...
Childhood sexual abuse is a beast in many of these books. In Richard Hoffman's spare, poignant Half the House (Harcourt Brace; 175 pages; $20), it sneaks in almost laconically after the author has given us a searing picture of his blue-collar family in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s, with a violent but caring father and two brothers who are terminally ill. Hazy reverence for the Catholic saints is counterpointed with hazy submission to the sadistic coach who lures the author, then age 10, to his house with pornography and sodomizes him: "Induced, premature, with a hunger urgent...