Word: eye
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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COVER: Computer-altered photo collage. Eye from Comstock Inc. Star Trek by Henry Gris -- FPG; credit cards by Robert Kristofik -- The Image Bank; Bernard Shaw courtesy CNN; travel by Paul Nehrenz -- The Image Bank; music by John Endress -- The Stock Market; Gone With the Wind from Photofest; The Crying Game courtesy Miramax Films; boxing by Neil Leifer; Arthur's Teacher Trouble courtesy Broderbund Software; VideoPhone courtesy AT&T; still-life photos by James Keyser...
...good at. But her hobbies, shoplifting clothes from Bergdorf and ingesting methamphetamine, which she does quite often from the tip of her jackknife blade, don't foretell a long and happy life. She is a diabetic, in addition, and her meth addiction worsens a deteriorating eye condition whose far end is blindness...
Sure, partly. This is a commercial novel, and if you have to bludgeon readers to get their attention, well, that's show biz. But the author has more to tell. A succession of interleaved flashbacks gives a strange family history, seen through a camera's cold eye. Through happenstance, her grandfather, an American migrant to Mexico, became a photographer in the early days of the art and specialized in elaborate portraits of dead children in confirmation finery. A meningitis plague brought him prosperity. He was a journeyman, but his son, her father, became a famed photographic artist, whose morbid specialty...
Reeve has hit on a key difference between stage and screen acting. On the stage an actor can seduce with gifts of voice and gesture; from the rear mezzanine all faces are equal. But the movie camera, that meticulous voyeur, is no respecter of technique. Its X-ray eye scans an actor's face for a fineness or boldness of line. Because most movies are illustrated fables, the camera wants faces that communicate -- in the immediate emotional shorthand of a close-up -- the character's pedigree to the audience. So film stardom is often the luck of the genetic draw...
...BOTTOM LINE: Elegantly written, but don't look for this male's-eye view of women on a feminist's bookshelf...