Word: clef
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That The Information is about literary envy complicates the story. Amis denies that the book is a roman e clef, and indeed, the characters are too over the top for positive identification. Martin Amis, the son of novelist Kingsley Amis, has always been eager to show that he can juggle words better and push satire further than his competition, including Dad. But there are limits, and they are beginning to show...
...been "identified" with other academics--Leslie Fiedler or Harold Bloom or whatever. And it pleases me, because he is a representative type--and Stanley has rather encouraged the likeness, I think. On the whole, I'm very careful not to portray people--I don't write romans a clef, though Small World is often read...
Most of her material apparently comes from her own experience, since she claims to have "a total recall of [my] teenage years." She describes many of these books as "romans a clef," where many of the characters and places represent similar elements from her real life...
This oddly lifeless gossip novel by Michael Korda, a publishing exec whose works include the yuppie missals Success! and Power!, is the sort called a roman a clef by the French and "serving up something for the shopgirls" by the English. There is a patronizing quality to the central notion, which is that the reader is a lowbrow who will have naughty fun -- "coo, oi didn't know that about 'er" -- guessing which real-life celebrities are behaving scandalously behind aliases and sketchy disguises...
...drama of a big story, the intrigue of an unfolding scandal or the power and glamour and sheer money associated with being a big-league anchor, interviewer or producer. In fiction and reality, TV executives often characterize themselves the way characters do in Jon Katz's roman a clef: as ranking among "the 25,000 most successful people in the world," right up there with generals, Senators, tycoons and Third World dictators. But here the big story and intrigue are inside TV itself -- the takeover of a network very much like CBS, where Katz was executive producer of the Morning...