Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...then there are those conservation-minded writers who try to squeeze fiction, criticism and metacriticism into a single volume. Nice Work, the newest novel by the British writer and English professor David Lodge, is the result of just such an effort...
...popular esteem while pursuing the good life in Paris, the Riviera and, above all, Klosters, the Swiss ski resort that ^ he and the beautiful, occasionally talented people he drew to him made famous. The ending even produces the kind of Faustian moral that goes down well in popular fiction: the hero achieves a full measure of worldly success but at the cost of his artistic soul...
...true that in novels like Nightwork Shaw could provide very intelligent entertainment. It is also true that in the midst of glitz he remained an agreeable, unpretentious man. But much of the late fiction was unbearably wooden, and much of the late life was marred by Shaw's insatiable womanizing. In the end, conviviality deteriorated to an often befuddled alcoholism that was more distressing than Shnayerson cares to admit...
...funny, adroit Nice Work would make an ideal vehicle for them. The novel's protagonist, Vic Wilcox, is a gruff but keen-witted exec struggling to turn around a laggard steel-parts factory in Rummidge -- "an imaginary city," the author informs us, "which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world." Vic's antagonist (and here the term is literal) is Robyn Penrose, an attractive, rigorously feminist lecturer in literature at the local university -- a specialist in the 19th century industrial novel, no less. To bolster...
While soft-landing scenarios provide reassuring reading, some economists think such forecasts belong on the fiction shelf. If U.S. economic history is any guide, a soft landing is a long shot. That kind of gentle slowdown occurred only once before, in 1967, when the military buildup during the Viet Nam War fueled a demand for capital goods...