Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Stones made a fair portion of it -- blowtorches nostalgia away, enlarging the memory, terror and all. The music reasserts history, not sentiment, and makes the same tough demands on head and heart as more traditional literature. Says the writer and essayist Steve Erickson: "Rock displaced the impact of American fiction because it wasn't afraid to believe in itself...
...field that includes his wife Joan Didion, Dunne has held his own as an observer of public and private wastelands. But he has found a more authentic voice in fiction (True Confessions; Dutch Shea, Jr.; The Red White and Blue). His characters are barbed, cynical and funny. Their attitudes and remarks reveal gifts for malice, resentment and mordant sentimentality, which Dunne associates with his immigrant heritage. As he writes in Harp, a memoir that takes its title from the slang for a son or daughter of the Old Sod, "Nothing lifts the heart of the Irish caroler more than...
Outside the ventriloquism of fiction, Dunne, 57, sounds like a Harp from one of his own novels. Yet he seems to have had some trouble getting comfortable with his natural delivery. The problem lies in the dirty secret of class consciousness. "It took me nearly a quarter of a century to realize that here was the tension that gave me a subject," he notes, after admitting that while growing up Irish Catholic in West Hartford, Conn., he yearned to be an Episcopalian and a member of Wasp society...
...created a barrier of estrangement between America's warrior class and the nation it serves. Tom Clancy's novels may be romanticized, but they have helped bring down this wall. Not bad for a small- town insurance man who thought he might try his hand at popular fiction...
...same universe as Lodge's prior two novels: the imaginary campus of Rummidge University in England. But unlike the two earlier works, which ranged over the entire globe, Nice Work confines itself almost entirely to the city of Rummidge, which, as the author explains, "occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world...