Word: fiction
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Occasionally, heartening evidence surfaces that some people still care about serious fiction after all. Here is a long, challenging novel by a highly praised writer, and it has spurred a frenzy of international attention. Headlines have bristled. Voices have been raised, although not exactly in unanimous praise. The book has been banned in a number of countries with substantial Muslim populations; its appearance in the West has been greeted with isolated public protests and telephoned bomb threats...
...almost a decade, Margaret Atwood's fellow Canadians have dubbed her the "high priestess of angst." If the title is not exactly flattering, it is not entirely unfair. Most of her previous two dozen volumes of poems and fiction were freighted with allegorical misery: The Edible Woman feels herself cannibalized by family and friends; the paleontologist of Life Before Man views the people around her as potential fossils; in The Handmaid's Tale, a future America goes to hell when it is taken over by religious fundamentalists. But in Cat's Eye, Atwood jettisons her old techniques in favor...
...fiction writers would have dared to imagine such a debacle. Outside the convention hall: the massed outrage of the counterculture -- antiwar activists, Viet Cong supporters, Yippies (who brought along their own presidential candidate, a porker named Pigasus). Within: the political machine that rumbled forward to confirm Hubert Horatio Humphrey as its nominee. Between the two sides: heavily armed National Guardsmen and the burly, blue- shirted Chicago police, the armed forces of Mayor Richard C. Daley, whose clubbing and gassing of demonstrators brought a new term into the American lexicon -- "police riot." When the beating and rock throwing stopped, the Democratic...
...ever been so eloquent about his society, or seemed so eager to speak beyond the grave to ours, as Francisco Goya (1746-1828). The idea of a universal painter, capable of addressing humanity in general rather than this or that time and culture in particular, may be a pious fiction, but Goya comes as close to fulfilling it as anyone has ever done. We see his face pressed to the glass of our terrible century, mouthing to make his warnings understood...
Like many skilled writers, she sacrifices balance for effects. This is acceptable, even necessary, in fiction. But in a memoir whose purpose is to expose one's own family in the glare of a social ideology, the practice seems simplistic and self-serving. There is, for example, her use of the familiar tale about the founding of the Bingham fortune. Grandfather Robert, "the Judge," bought into Louisville publishing with money from the estate of Mary Lily Flagler, his second wife. The Judge was rumored to have killed Mary Lily, but there was never any evidence that would support a criminal...