Word: highborn
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Comparisons of the fate of the family to Greek tragedy are commonplace, though the analogy comes just as close to the Romans. The Gracchi, two highborn brothers in the second century B.C. who scorned their fellow aristocrats and were elected tribunes to effect social good, were both assassinated. But when one thinks of the Kennedys, the Greeks come to mind--the Agamemnon family especially--because one feels that their disasters can only be the result of some terrible curse. It's all nonsense and superstition, of course. But this is what happens when "frail thoughts dally with false surmise" about...
...spare style ensures that her work is entirely free of sentimentality or melodrama. What she doesn't say becomes almost more important than what she does; readers are left to decipher the twisted relationships of the characters--the fact that Myrtle willingly bears George's children because his highborn wife cannot, for instance--as best they can. There may be love in this novel, but there is little that is sweet...
Edward Daugherty is shown at the height of his powers in The Flaming Corsage, when his play of the same name scandalizes proper Albanians in 1912. In Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, set in the mid-1930s, Daugherty is forgotten and senile. Katrina Taylor, his lovely, highborn wife in the new novel, was evoked in Billy, as she was in Ironweed. The leading character of the Pulitzer-prizewinning Ironweed was an alcoholic ex-baseball player, Francis Phelan. In the new novel he is Katrina Daugherty's ardent young lover...
...most memorable is Leete, which begins in darkness with an amatory grope in a formal garden and ends in darkness as a new bride goes off to her rough-hewn, rural marriage bed. This journey is made by a daughter of a highborn member of Parliament to avoid being a pawn in political maneuverings by her father (played with poignancy and ruthlessness by artistic director Newton). She rejects a lord in favor of the family gardener, a sweet-natured man whose heart belongs, hopelessly, to her sister-in-law. The deliberately oblique text may frustrate audiences who want to know...
...will remember, of course, that Bernard Samson, England's rough-cut intelligence agent in Berlin, was bamboozling communist Stasi operatives with great success until his beautiful and highborn wife Fiona defected to East Germany and set up shop as a KGB colonel, no less. This breach of marital etiquette caused Samson endless problems -- how to find a suitable nanny for the children, whether to marry his young mistress, how to prove that he himself was not a Soviet mole, and so on -- detailed moodily and lengthily in the two most recent novels of Deighton's double trilogy, Spy Hook...