Word: diamond
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...author. By the middle of the book, the crusade is all but forgotten, and the reader has become enmeshed in the travails of a fabulously rich Israeli named Meyer Alinsky who, it turns out, has all along had his own special uses for poor Murphy. Alinsky's Diamond is not so much a case of an overcomplicated plot, in fact, as a whole flea market full of story lines...
ALINSKY'S DIAMOND...
...Alinsky's Diamond he quits his familiar landscape and sets out on a literary crusade nearly as unfortunate as the one he describes in this novel. In the beginning, Francis X. Murphy, from Aruba, Ohio, is rotting away in a French château. He has married a baron's daughter and ruined her family - indeed the whole village of Vardille-sur-Lac - by being caught doctoring the local wine. As penance, Murphy resolves to drink himself to death by swallowing all 12,000 unsalable bottles...
...time he is writing about people he does not know. The crusaders, the thugs, the conmen in these pages are strangers to the author. McHale has clearly shown that he can be a dazzling extemporizer, but he badly needs familiar roots. The very restlessness demonstrated in Alinsky's Diamond may contribute to something enduring in the future. For now, though, McHale's imagination can do without this kind of exotic melodrama. > Martha Duffy
Best rock group: Elizabeth Taylor's diamond and sapphire consolation prizes in her divorce from Richard Burton...