Word: books
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sketch of two prisoners in a cell, with one bitterly denouncing his child as "incorrigible." Since then, William Steig, 71, has published nearly 2,000 drawings there; to celebrate his 50th year at the magazine, he has selected more than 250 for publication in a new book. The world of Steig is populated mostly by grotesques, human and animal, gamboling through life. More often than not, critics treat his work as art. Steig is less sure. "I suppose every cartoonist likes to be called an artist," he says, "but if people ask me what I am, I say cartoonist...
...Johnson County War, a bloody skirmish involving cattlemen, rustlers, vigilantes and the U.S. Cavalry in 1892 Wyoming, ranks well below Jenkins' Ear as a minor footnote to history. No longer. In fact, if the Guinness Book of World Records ever devises an entry for History's Most Expensive Minor Footnote, the frontier fracas may find itself at the top of the list. Credit for the elevation goes to Michael Cimino, 38, the Oscar-winning director of The Deer Hunter. Cimino's new film, Heaven's Gate, will dramatize the Johnson County War as lavishly...
...Freudian trampolines for a spry intelligence; the escape from solemnity required a more studied effort. Oddly, Roth's most exciting work of the '70s remains relatively unknown: two long stories first published in American Review. In On the Air, a talent agent named Lippman attempts to book Albert Einstein as radio's first Jewish Answer Man, only to find that the road to Princeton is a gauntlet of murderous anti-Semites. Looking at Kafka began as a critical essay and gracefully unfurled into a fantasy in which Kafka did not die in 1924 but emigrated...
...suggestion that Anne Frank is alive and working at Harvard's library. But Roth steps back from the inviting brink of fantasy. He retreats, in fact, to the drab reality of the 1950s, the time of his own spectacular debut as the author of Goodbye, Columbus. The new book retains the look, if not the actual furniture, of autobiography. Goodbye, Columbus is called Higher Education; its author is Nathan Zuckerman who, like Roth, was raised in a middle-class Jewish section of Newark. His story is based on a family embarrassment, a tale of money, lawsuits and maternal sacrifice...
...real Amy curtly evades Nathan's questions about her background. She is a smart and very tough cookie. As is Lonoff; as is Zuckerman; as is Roth himself. The Ghost Writer is a bruising book. Within its artfully tangled plot, Roth tells off his critics and debunks romantic notions of the writing life. Henry James' "passion of doubt" and "madness of art" become a medieval incubus and fanatic patience; Lonoff, more the ascetic Old World Jew than his Yankee trappings might indicate, spends all his time pushing sentences around and worrying about them. His comment on writing...