Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Foreign Affairs, Lurie's seventh book of fiction, explores the vocabularies of love and friendship. It is a tale of two citizens (U.S.) played out in an alien though strangely familiar land (U.K.). Virginia Miner, "54 years old, small, plain, and unmarried - the sort of person that no one ever notices," has returned to London to research children's rhymes. Fred Turner, 28 and gorgeous, is in town to polish off a book on 18th century Poet-Playwright John...
...Fall accedes readily enough to the demands of celebrity: Tell us all, tell us the worst, tell us more than we think we want to know. Although Quentin, the play's protagonist, is a lawyer, and Maggie, his second wife, is a pop singer, the veils quickly fall. Fiction is revealed as self-pitying psychodrama, and Miller's descent into himself risks being taken as a wallow in metaphysical sleaze...
Charles Ludlam is at it again. His Ridiculous Theatrical Company, the Greenwich Village troupe that on a shoestring has rejuvenated the manly art of comic burlesque, now turns for its inspiration to the penny dreadful, a sensational form of fiction that nourished in Victorian Britain...
Despite Arlen's grand theme, his book feels slight. He has turned to book-length fiction comparatively late in life; evidently it is not his natural form. Even so, Arlen has sound instincts about human nature: Tom is wholly believable in his fumbling attempts to launch a just-us-guys friendship with his father's latest collaborator; Sam's mistress Maria performs a convincing balancing act between servility and possession. Arlen's prose, if too painstakingly crafted, is at once taut and richly evocative. And in its glimpses of combat between father...
...scene came from Trinidad and Port of Spain and the crowded, colorful street where Naipaul spent part of his childhood. In later years, with an established and growing reputation, Naipaul returned several times to Trinidad and environs. He looked up Bogart, the man who had inspired his first successful fiction, but his travels home chiefly brought him his own late father, reconstructed from family reminiscences and old newspaper clippings. This discovery, movingly recreated, gives the mature son something of the heritage and tradition he thought he had been denied...