Word: fictions
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Back in 1988, when he was just another guy getting off a subway train in Harlem, Samuel Jackson caught his foot in the door and was dragged 300 ft. along the platform. He sued, and has finally been awarded $540,000. To paraphrase Jackson's character in Pulp Fiction, "You will know what my name is when I lay my vengeance upon thee...
...nothing else, Babel Tower suggests a reason that not very much thrilling fiction has been written about the workings of education committees. Byatt's interests here are more philological than dramatic. All her various plots underscore the mixed blessings of language, its power to obscure as well as reveal, to enslave as well as liberate. The subject is certainly worthy but not perhaps sufficiently vivid to propel readers through a long, long literary haul. Byatt writes beautifully, and passages of this novel come to brilliant life. But the net effect of the whole, as opposed to the parts, seems...
...with language. Impressive too is the quiet way in which Patrick, the narrator, finally comes to terms with his conflicting drives. There is a surprising modesty here at the end of this clamorous and overreaching book, a frank conservatism that is close to daring in a work of contemporary fiction...
...dramatizations of his life, he lashes out at a former mistress who sleeps her way to silent-movie stardom. "Love is vertical," he writes. "You are relentlessly horizontal." Off the stage he confronts the novel's villain, an envious journalist and failed writer, with the killer line, "If your fiction was half as imaginative as your lies, you would have been famous years...
...type is undoubtedly familiar to Kennedy, a former newspaperman who has successfully transferred the virtues of clarity and concision to fiction. At just over 200 pages, The Flaming Corsage contains more dramatic events, bright dialogue and strong characters than most novels twice its length. The generous spirit is best reflected by Daugherty's dying father, who jauntily toasts his own send-off with a growler of ale and an intimation of paradise that, he says, resembles the inside of a fireman's boot. "That's not what heaven looks like," says his priest. "Then," replies the elder Daugherty...