Word: clef
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...urge to write about it; hence the overflowing cornucopia of political novels good and bad, and the more recent explosion of campaign books that claim to be nonfiction. Rarely, however, does a good political novel so closely tread the path of reality that it becomes a roman a clef which by its publication may influence the outcome of an upcoming election. The bleeding of real campaigns and easily identifiable political figures, composing a gripping tale and simultaneously making an explicit political statement, are what set The Shad Treatment apart from most political novels and make it worth reading...
Marriage Revealed. Lesley Stahl, 35, CBS News Washington correspondent; and Aaron Latham, 33, former reporter and author of an upcoming roman à clef (Orchids for Mother) about the CIA; she for the second time, he for the first; on Feb. 17, in Washington, D.C. The couple met in 1973 when Stahl was covering the Senate Watergate hearings for CBS and Latham interviewed her for a New York magazine story...
...kept pace with series plans for Seventh Avenue, by Norman Bogner, and Wheels, by Arthur Hailey. Not resting on its ratings, ABC has hired Roots Producer Stan Margulies for a ten-hour version of Hawaii, by James Michener. Washington, a series based on John Ehrlichman's roman a clef, The Company, has already gone before the cameras with Actors Jason Robards and Robert Vaughn...
...satisfactorily furious, and one of the minor real-life woman characters took to bed for a week). Aldous Huxley did a number on D.H. Lawrence as the brilliantly insufferable crank, Mark Rampion, in Point Counter Point. Political debts have been paid too. One of the first romans à clef, Madeleine de Scudéry's Artamène; ou Le Grand Cyrus (1649), encoded in fiction the court of Louis XIV. H.G. Wells savaged Winston Churchill under the cover of Rupert Catskill in Men Like Gods...
What, then, sets apart the roman à clef of 1976? Hardly the quality of its malice. In the first installment of Answered Prayers, set at Manhattan's La Côte Basque restaurant during lunchtime, Capote was out to make his readers throw up while his characters ate. But he is merely a sniggering Boy Scout compared with Jonathan Swift, who, in A Tale of a Tub, had a character kneel in the street to pray, then void his bladder in the eyes of the passersby leaning over to investigate...