Word: gossipers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Singer's fictional world has long consisted of three main realms, and this volume is divided pretty much equally among them. Eight stories are set in Polish villages or provincial small towns, where everyone knows everyone else's business and gossip is the preferred mode of entertainment. "There were no secrets in Krashnik," says the narrator of The Image. "People peered into keyholes and listened behind doors." Thus when the marriage between a village beauty and a bright yeshiva boy remains stubbornly unconsummated, the odd reason why cannot long escape becoming common knowledge. As before, Singer's tales of rural...
...stockbroker by day, has mastered American directness and uses a different word: "Eurotrash. People say we are a little idle, a little too rich. I suppose it's true." After work or shopping, the teenage countesses and bejeaned barons gather at Club A, a jewel-box disco, to dance, gossip and compare invitations. "It's all a game to them," says a Columbia University business student, Jeffrey von der Schulenburg, 27, a German count by birth, "really just playacting, and in the end, they're Europeans again...
...Port au Prince neighborhood from which many came. Hand-lettered French signs are pasted on walls and hung uncertainly from storefronts. Creole patois burbles everywhere. One hot afternoon on Nostrand Avenue recently, the Impeccable barber shop was crowded. Men had gathered under the fans for companionship, a bit of gossip, not haircuts. "We Haitians love to get together," says the owner of a neighborhood restaurant. "We talk about Haiti, about Papa Doc. New York is a tough city, very tough. But here you have freedom, and that is what we Haitians need." Indeed so: the man did not want...
...judge which of five obscenities is the strongest, for example, and a sobering public confrontation when the author meets a hostile press after testifying for Jack Henry Abbott in the ex-convict's trial for the murder of Richard Adan, a Greenwich Village waiter. Mostly the book is grand gossip, a sort of Portable Hamptons, Everyman's own private literary soiree for a long afternoon in the hammock...
Beattie keeps the pace of her story brisk and the atmosphere antic but genial. People who assume that TV and gossip columns can bestow meaning on their lives might come in for criticism in some quarters. Not here. Reading Love Always is as easy and relaxing as watching a field of fireflies at dusk...