Word: hellman
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...succeeds, not in bringing Sarah Cameron to life but in capturing an altogether different subject: the enigma of experiences filtered through memory. As if dropping a clue, Hellman mentions Proust in passing. Her method, as it turns out, is the opposite of his. She extracts drama from the act of forgetting: "As time and much of life has passed, my memory-which for the purpose of this tale has kept me awake sorting out what I am certain of, what maybe I added to what, because I didn't see or know the people-won't supply what...
...Hellman. The reports of her death may have been exaggerated. Evidence is presented that Sarah lives on, the beneficiary of a life-insurance scam. She is important to the author only because she survives in the mind, one ghost among many...
...Hellman convincingly portrays herself as someone who would tell more if she only knew more. Pose or not, the stratagem works and the surface holds. People meet, get drunk together, exchange pleasantries or insults, separate, come to various bad or unhappy ends. Mobsters mix with writers, money is thrown around, beauty saves the last waltz for evil. All this is transmitted through a literary imagination clearly shaped by the 1930s. The wastrels and addled debutantes whom Hellman keeps bumping into could have been, perhaps were, created by F. Scott Fitzgerald...
When she describes a sensuous experience, like going swimming, Hellman reaches for her Hemingway: "The water was the right temperature, everything was good, everything was better." She has kept a large vocabulary out of Dashiell Hammett, her longtime companion, and gang ster films. "Stuff' and "junk" are all-purpose nouns; a restaurant is a "steak joint" or a "fish dump...
Those who have been annoyed by such mannerisms in the past may find them less objectionable here. They not only convey the period that Hellman strains to retrieve, but their tough-gal veneer is offset by the sadness and vulnerability of the woman within...