Word: fictions
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This fear has been made acute by the unexpected success of The Nanny Diaries (St. Martin's; $24.95), a novel of bad manners set on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The book is in its sixth printing and in ninth place on the New York Times fiction best-seller list. The film rights have been sold to Miramax for a reported $500,000. And the first-time authors, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, two peppy twentysomething graduates of New York University, have been all over the morning television shows...
...they leave her with a party of 12 small children, an unfenced pool and nothing but Brie in the fridge; and--indignity of indignities--they give her earmuffs for Christmas. (The piano teacher gets an Hermes bag and a check.) The part about earmuffs, at least, isn't fiction. "We have both been given earmuffs," says Kraus, "after months of really hard work...
...struggling to find some remedy for the damage she has done. Her solution is not plain until the surprising final pages, when you grasp that if storytelling can be an occasion for sin, it can also be an act of contrition. It's McEwan's subtle game to show fiction working its worst kind of curse, then leading us unawares to give it our blessing...
...Ernest Lehman had written the story "Sweet Smell of Success" in 1950, when he was an ex-press agent, a nobody, and Walter Winchell was the most powerful newspaperman in America. The veiled fiction about the columnist didn't seem to ruffle him. "I don't fool with the Ernest Lehmans of the world," Winchell supposedly said. "I go after the Westbrook Peglers [a right-wing journalist]." Five years later, Lehman was a big-shot screenwriter ("Executive Suite," "Sabrina") and reluctant to have the romanette-a-clef turned into a movie. But the indie-prod outfit Hecht-Lancaster...
...shortly after the picture was made. The Brill Building, Tin Pan Alley's Deco palace, still gleams, though it was never a residence; J.J.'s penthouse apartment, with its marble finishings, a Xanadu-size fireplace and a terrace that beckons frail lovelies to jump off, is the film's fiction - why shouldn't a man who is all business live in an office building...