Word: balzacian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...