Word: fortyish
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...unfamiliar cooking that we write novels about. Too many novels and too whiny the reader decides. The genre is one that is not petering out but should. Until then, an amiable and cheerfully unwhiny exception is Thomas McGuane's Nothing but Blue Skies. The author's hero is a fortyish Deadrock, Montana, ^ businessman named Frank Copenhaver, who misplaces his marbles when his wife Gracie packs her bags. In this addlepated condition, he galumphs about drinking too much (or not enough; this isn't clear), getting into fistfights, making rotten investments and then affronting his bankers, eating frozen dinners...
...racial dimension flows naturally into the political, where the uglier side of Quayle's mission begins to become apparent. One of Quayle's amazing but unlikable feats last week was metaphorically to transform old Willie Horton into a beautiful blond fortyish wasp has-it-all knockout. (Horton was the black murderer who raped a housewife while on furlough during the time that 1988 Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis was Governor of Massachusetts; the Bush campaign used Horton to ridicule Dukakis.) So in 1992, by Quayle's interesting subliminal design, Murphy carries at least some of Willie's message: mindless liberalism allied...
...high income, Brown seems a poor vehicle for examining the problem of children born without fathers. Yet she has more in common with the inner-city teenager than we might think. The 14-year-old gets pregnant as a way to give her life meaning. Murphy Brown and fortyish women like her want a tiny version of their nearly perfect selves to give their lives more meaning...
OUTERBRIDGE REACH by Robert Stone (Ticknor & Fields; $21.95). Owen Browne, a fortyish American male, plunges into an improbable sailboat race around the globe. The hero's wife and a cynical documentary filmmaker observe Owen's quest with different interests in mind. The conclusion is shattering and not to be forgotten...
Stone's task this time resembles the ones he undertook in such previous novels as Dog Soldiers (1974) and A Flag for Sunrise (1981): exposing characters to dangers, external and psychological, that they may be unprepared to handle. Owen Browne, fortyish, a graduate of the Naval Academy who served four years in Vietnam, now sells pleasure boats for an outfit called Altan Marine. Ruggedly handsome -- he appears in company promotional videotapes -- Browne is also by most conventional standards a good person, dutiful, loyal and faithful to Anne, an editor, writer and his wife of 20 years. The Brownes have...