Word: cleffed
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Though Vidal's Myra is one of the most amusing idealists in American fiction, the absolute obviously does not exist in literary or any other form. But the relative truth about Two Sisters is that it is mainly a put-on of the roman à clef, a teasing mix of characters that do and do not resemble real people. As always, what Vidal puts on is stylishly cut. Basically there is the "now" of his own voice and the "then" of the book's principal fictional creation, a journal written by Eric Van Damm, who was killed...
...Felice Gordon, for instance, in The Pleasure Principle looks into the bed and bored accommodations of a beautiful and renowned American widow now wed to a Greek shipping magnate. Attractive Lois Gould, widow of a New York newspaperman, has created that city's most piquant putative roman a clef in years by writing her first novel about the wife of a New York art director who discovers that most of her girl friends loved her dying husband both too wisely and too well...
Drame à Clef. Osborne uses the occasion to contrast the manipulative vampirism of the producer with the task and plight of the writer. At play's end, the band of esthetic fugitives receive word that their boss has committed suicide. Some English reviewers have interpreted the play as a drame a clef-Osborne's public vendetta with Producer-Director Tony Richardson after a recent bitter breakup of their long working relationship. Ordinary audiences, however, can hardly be expected to make sense of arcane theatrical gossip...
...publishing a string of sexual scenes for the sake of titillation." For what other purpose then? Says Geis: "There is a perfectly legitimate public curiosity about what goes on behind the scenes." Not that people really find out what goes on in the Geis version of the roman è clef. The formula does not require that the novel be based even loosely on truth or, for that matter, on gossip...
...resemblance to a real American family is coincidental - or, at any rate, deplorable. But Old Hearst Newsman Horan, who has knocked out 24 books (King's Rebel, The Great American West) since 1942, is obviously trying hard to create the impression that he is writing a roman à clef about the Kennedys. For this reason alone, his account of money as the lubricant of U.S. politics just might become the most ineptly written bestseller of the month...