Word: janowitz
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...second category, less snappy but still humorous after several readings, is comprised of more lengthy parodies of an author's tone or manner. The writers have made some eclectic choices, and those readers unfamiliar with Tama Janowitz's works will be confused by the sequel to Gone With the Wind written in her style...
Even many of the fiction writers who emerged in the late 1980s -- Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, Jay McInerney, to name the usual suspects -- seemed to be in it for the money and fame. That makes today's young adults pessimistic that originals like Tom Robbins or Timothy Leary or the Rolling Stones will come along in their time. But then even the Stones are not really the Stones these days. "Kids aren't stupid," says Mike O'Connell, 23, of Chicago, lead singer of his own band, Rights of the Accused. "The Stones aren't playing rock 'n' roll...
Billed as a "guide to the books everyone talks about and some people even read," Spy Notes satirizes hip, urban novels. A chapter synopsis of a Tama Janowitz novel: "Eleanor goes to Wilfredo's apartment for a dinner party. The couples are all men. The reader understands that Wilfredo is homosexual. Eleanor does not. This is called dramatic irony...
Sustained, coherent narrative is not, shall we say, Janowitz's great strength, and neither is dramatic characterization. Eleanor (the normally perky, cuddly Bernadette Peters in sadly deflated condition) is a designer of funky hats who suffers from a possibly justifiable weakness of the ego. She lives with a graffiti artist named Stash (Adam Coleman Howard) who has a definitely unjustified air of superiority. Before they finally break up, this tedious pair go to many noisy parties and performance-art evenings. Along the way, art-world fights, flirtations and fornications are noted but not explored in a script that is always...
...fault is not entirely Janowitz's. Her only hope was to find a director who could either respond avidly to the sexual and creative energies of the avant-garde scene or take a satirical cudgel to it. Instead, she drew distant, enervated James Ivory (A Room with a View, Heat and Dust, The Bostonians), who never seems to engage fully with any subject he has tackled and who has never been more fastidiously withdrawn than he is here. In this case, however, audiences will be well advised to follow his example...