Word: jolt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...police," begins Martin Amis' novel Night Train (Harmony; 175 pages; $20). "I am a police and my name is Detective Mike Hoolihan. And I am a woman, also." And with that satisfying jolt, we're off, as Amis once again bombards, delights, excites and irritates the reader with his hard-edged writing and warped spirit. Paying homage to the American tough-guy novelists of yore--Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler--Night Train pushes the boundaries of noir almost to the edge of darkness. The experiment does not always work, but this little book never gets boring...
...first song on singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco's new album, Little Plastic Castle, starts off with a jolt. We've come to expect shocks from DiFranco--she's a rock maverick, a singer who owns her own label (Righteous Babe Records of Buffalo, New York), who refuses to sign to a major record company and who performs often raucous punk-folk songs about music-industry greed, abortion and her own bisexuality. DiFranco is so fiercely protective of her work that she was miffed when a recent cover of one of her songs, 32 Flavors, by newcomer Alana Davis added...
Elmore Leonard doesn't spend a lot of effort word-painting backgrounds for his hard-guy capers. You know you're in Detroit or Miami or Hollywood because one of Leonard's sterling villains or slightly bent heroes tells you so. It's a jolt, nevertheless, to find that his latest thriller, Cuba Libre (Delacorte; 343 pages; $23.95), steams into Havana harbor on its first page, and that the shattered mast visible above the water is that of the U.S. battleship Maine, sunk three days earlier...
Benfey often dives so deep into such detail that the reappearance of Degas is a jolt: Degas, again? The cogent explanations of Degas' paintings interspersed through the text transcend this discontinuity. New Criticism be damned, Benfey glories in tying the fiction of Cable and Chopin and the art of Degas to their personal lives. Whether connecting Degas' cousins to various figures in his paintings or noting how Degas' artistic preoccupation with the unfamiliar presence of African-Americans seeped into his work, Benfey perceptively joins life...
...came the Asian Miracle, as booming Pacific Rim countries showed the rest of the world how to grow. Now comes the Asian Meltdown, as turmoil across the region shakes markets from Hong Kong to Wall Street. Last week it was Japan and South Korea that gave the world a jolt. No sooner had rumors of a possible South Korean collapse swept out of Seoul than the Japanese yen and the Tokyo stock market plunged to their lowest levels in two years. Across the Pacific, the ill winds from Asia blew the Dow Jones industrial average into a 157-point drop...