Word: clef
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...accused Capote of betraying their confidences. "The reaction has been completely unjust," pouted Truman, 51, last week. "If I were not an extra-experienced, objective person, it would have crushed me." The uncrushed author is returning to Esquire this month with still another chapter from his roman à clef. Ominously titled Unspoiled Monsters, the new installment will describe the narrator of Answered Prayers, a struggling writer named P.B. Jones, and what promises to be the book's central character, a figure named Kate McCloud. Destined to appear as the first chapter in Capote's novel, Monsters follows Jones...
Greeting Drivers. One of the first and flashiest publishers to seize on the new promotional opportunities was Bernard Geis. He advanced the concept of the book as property into the book as package deal, and he Svengalied willing authors into writing potboilers and racy romans à clef. Incorporated in the Geis Zeit was Jacqueline Susann, whose Valley of the Dolls (1966) was launched with an advertising budget...
...anthropomorphize his characters into Shmoos or possums, nor does he disguise the identities of real-life figures. On occasion Doonesbury has gone anachronistic: in a Bicentennial flashback, Paul Revere's feminist apprentice yearns to be a "Minuteperson." In addition, the strip frequently becomes an illuminated roman à clef sprinkled with such celebrities as Journalist Hunter S. Thompson Jr., who is thinly disguised as Zonker Harris' dope-eating Uncle Duke. Duke last month was named U.S. envoy to China after a Senate confirmation hearing overlooking massive corporate payoffs to him. Thompson denies that he is insulted by this unflattering...
...figures, under various disguises, in several of Waugh's novels. On the whole this problematic relationship between author and subject is exploited only for good reasons. Sykes's indentifications of the real identities of Waugh's characters (and almost all his books have a large dose of roman a clef in them) are much more convincing as he makes it clear that he knew them all personally. The only area of restraint caused by his close relationship is Waugh's marriage, a subject on which he sheds almost no light, aside from denying that Laura Waugh was a "doormat...
...expression of personal bitterness, a la Positively 4th Street, he appears to become more and more conscious of the distinction between himself and his persona--like Proust who, when he saw his readers approaching the early volumes of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu as a roman a clef, had his narrator relate an internal monologue in which he addresses himself as Marcel, then hastens to add, in parentheses, "if indeed the narrator of this novel can be called Marcel...