Word: byatt
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...LaBute is a hard worker: he prepared and directed The Shape of Things while editing his film Possession, based on the A.S. Byatt novel. "I needed a night job," he said at the opening. The new play is a night story, a cautionary tale to tell the naive young before they drift to sleep dreaming of the perfect mate. It flicks references to other fables of sexual predation (Fatal Attraction, Play Misty for Me), while stirring a mood of increasing emotional dread. And at its heart is the notion that an artist-anyway, a novelist or playwright?is essentially...
...many renowned works of 20th century literature in attractive, hardcover volumes, to choose, from an unlimited field of candidates, the 100 best novels written in English since 1900. No big deal--especially since the board is made up of respectable thinkers and writers including Daniel J. Boorstin, A.S. Byatt, Shelby Foote, Edmund Morris, William Styron and Gore Vidal...
Possession is by far A.S. Byatt's best-known novel. A miraculous blend of contemporary and Victorian morality and romance, it won the 1990 Booker Prize in Britain just as it was being published in the U.S. to glowing reviews and warm sales. Babel Tower (Random House; 625 pages; $25.95) is Byatt's first novel since then, and will surely attract the attention of all those enchanted by Possession. It is also likely to provoke some head scratching, since the new novel continues a story begun in two of Byatt's earlier, pre-Possession books...
...nothing else, Babel Tower suggests a reason that not very much thrilling fiction has been written about the workings of education committees. Byatt's interests here are more philological than dramatic. All her various plots underscore the mixed blessings of language, its power to obscure as well as reveal, to enslave as well as liberate. The subject is certainly worthy but not perhaps sufficiently vivid to propel readers through a long, long literary haul. Byatt writes beautifully, and passages of this novel come to brilliant life. But the net effect of the whole, as opposed to the parts, seems...
...self-interest: big, highly publicized deals raise the negotiating floor for everyone. But Amis' grab offended the sensibilities of some of his English literary colleagues. One was novelist Julian Barnes, who had a good reason: he's the husband of Kavanagh, Amis' former agent. Another was A.S. Byatt, whose novel Possession was published by Jonathan Cape, who also brought out Amis' previous novels. "I don't see why I should subsidize his greed," said Byatt, "simply because he has a divorce to pay for and has just had all his teeth redone." The dental work in question was done...