Word: balzacian
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Think of it. A blond and brazen newspaper reporter makes her mark as a merciless critic of Washington's Balzacian social scene. She marries the boss, moves into a mansion and becomes more of a star than most of the characters she used to profile. After a few years, she writes her first novel, a steamy social satire and, of course, a sure best seller. It is the kind of dizzying ascent that Sally Quinn, the Washington Post's famous acid pen of the '70s, might have chronicled with flair. But she can't: the reporter-turned- hostessturned-novelist...
...fashioned digging also won a Pulitzer for the Miami Herald's Edna Buchanan, a police reporter for 20 years who can turn a 7-Eleven stickup into a compelling tale of Balzacian detail that illuminates the lives of robber and victim alike. The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader earned its first Pulitzer for a series that revealed payoffs to University of Kentucky basketball players. Jeffrey Marx, who shared the award with Michael York, is only 23 years...
...special affection for an imagined cast: "I can see myself, like Balzac, inquiring after them on my deathbed." Such admiration can be as seductive?and as lethal?as a spy's gentleness. For despite its style and tongue-and-groove plotting, The Honourable Schoolboy sometimes displays a Balzacian tendency to turn urges into passions, to exaggerate expression into melodrama. Moreover, facts, facts, facts are better left to the journalist-reprobates. Le Carré's long suit is not, after all, reportage, but a "second soul" that amplifies the century's dilemmas...
...Balzacian novel from which John and Maureen Dean sprang is now reaching a richly ironic climax. Freed from prison after serving only four months of his one-to four-year Watergate sentence, John hurried home to Mo in Los Angeles to tot up the wages of sin. There was the $350,000 advance from Simon & Schuster for hard-cover rights to John's account of life with Nixon, and the same publisher's undisclosed advance to Mo for her version of life with John. Then there is John's lecture tour, which starts...
...ragpicker; the baron makes her buy the latest imported fineries. Ippolita doles out fourth-rate wine to the servants in "a quantity congruous for Christians of base extraction." The baron invites them to lap up casks of vintage Vaiano. When the baron goes off to war, Ippolita, with Balzacian parsimony, delightedly returns to her beans and mush, pawns her fine dresses and lights one dim lamp of an evening...