Word: clef
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...that account prospective buyers of The Company should beware. A Washington roman à clef it is; a full-scale Watergate book it is not. Ehrlichman is clearly using fiction as an extension of politics by other means; but his novel ends with word that a member of the White House staff has just been caught breaking into the headquarters of a Democratic candidate. The Company, in fact, bears the same relation to the final drama of Watergate that successive Shakespearean history plays bear to one another. There is some overlap. Dark deeds and blood feuds of the past rise...
...energy than the rancorous opinions that stream from the mouths of the characters. Many of these views are clearly Agnew's own, and a disproportionate number demonstrate that the former Vice President bears a chronic grudge against the press. Although The Canfield Decision is not a roman à clef, a nosy columnist named "Andy Jackerson" gets a going over. A Russian, for example, sees America in decline because "the country is under attack by professional critics with an unlimited supply of ink and microphones." Such a thing could not happen in the Soviet Union. If the author...
...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...