Word: fictionalization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Every Woman Should Know, must now be looking at their partners with smug glances, confident that they have figured out the mysteries of male machismo. It is this false sense of knowledge, based not on experience but on easy answers and ready-made explanations offered by escapist non-fiction, that can truly be damaging. Logically, it would seem that problems would be better solved looking at each relationship rather than trying to fit our jigsaw pieces into someone else's puzzle...
...controversy has created a hot little industry. Ray Santilli, the Englishman who is peddling the footage, says it has been seen in 32 countries. Britain's Channel Four aired a documentary on the subject. In the U.S. an hour-long show called Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction? has become a staple of Fox TV--the X-Files network--and has been among the top 25 sellers in video stores. Before the end of the year, the tape will be offered in 35 catalogs, including the Publishers Clearing House mailings...
Were Ives the creation of a less probing writer, his immutable goodness would seem comic. Characters like him show up in contemporary fiction as often as they do in real life, which is to say virtually never. But Hijuelos succeeds in making Ives believable largely by treating his kindness with almost perfunctory matter-of-factness. In unembellished sentence after unembellished sentence, Hijuelos lists Ives' charitable acts as if they were entries in a Filofax: "One of the things he did out of the office was to produce advertising to raise money for different funds, especially for Harlem kids. Working with...
PERHAPS BECAUSE IT IS WRITTEN with college-educated book buyers in mind, literary fiction these days teems with nice, sensible characters. Oh, sure, they have problems: their marriages turn drab, their careers seem stalled, all their good intentions cannot protect them from the knowledge that they are, every day, growing older. Their response to these travails tends to involve exhaustive introspection and maybe a psychiatrist or a hobby to snap them out of their blahs. They are as harmless as they are uninteresting...
...first glance, the heroine-narrator of Susanna Moore's fourth novel, In the Cut (Knopf; 180 pages, $21), seems to fit perfectly into the polite cast of contemporary fiction. Frannie Thorstin, 34, lives on Washington Square in lower Manhattan, where the ghost of Henry James still whispers to the sensitive. She teaches creative writing in a city program for teenagers "of what is called low achievement and high intelligence." She is also writing a book on dialects and regional slang, particularly as they occur in the five boroughs of New York City. She notes, "The words themselves--in their...