Word: jamesians
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...characters. Some are confronted with familiar situations. The young woman in the title story learns the truth about her parents' marriage after her mother dies and her father's new wife tactfully but deliberately eliminates traces of her predecessor. The plot of The Skaters is complicated and, yes, Jamesian: a disinherited son is helped by his lawyer's wife, whose lover steals the original copy of the damaging will. Spencer is dispassionate about domestic morality but intensely curious about the things people do, the lies they live and the truths they hide. Her stories are graceful, solidly crafted and honest...
...retrospect, it is easy to see why Henry James at first viewed the younger Edith Wharton with some alarm. He might have invented her, except that she was a Jamesian heroine even richer and brighter than his imagination had dared. And her novels made more money than his. The record of their growing friendship is only one of many happy adventures in this brimming, brilliant collection...
Like fiddlers who want to conduct and comedians who yearn to play Hamlet, thriller writers sometimes show symptoms of hankering after respectability. John le Carre has handled this problem by surrounding his plots with a Jamesian density of details and implications. Now Len Deighton, known to millions of readers as the author of The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin, has, temporarily at least, given up suspense altogether...
...tell right off when a novelist knows his way around the block. Take the first sentence of Larry McMurtry's moody, sensitive, ironic yet lightheartedly despairing new novel: "Duane was in the hot tub, shooting at his new doghouse with a .44 Magnum." The Jamesian restraint of the language -- not "Blam, blam, blam, wood chips glinted in the dusty air," but a dreamlike, almost passive kind of doghouse blasting -- foreshadows subtle stuff. The hero, we sense, is a country boy (the name Duane, and the implication that there is enough vacant acreage behind the doghouse so that stray bullets...
Soon enough, though, she straightens up to introduce herself to the camera. It's not that she cares what people think of her, she says with a candid smile, but "enough is enough." Tired of being called a "freak" (in the Rick Jamesian sense), she'd like to set the record straight. Thus, the parade of Nola-experts--including father, ex-roommate, sexologist, and lovers--rolls out. She knows that their comments--for instance, "I was the best thing to happen to Nola Darling...I was the sculptor, and she was but a piece of clay"--will be her best...