Word: lemann
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Baby boomers lack this palpable hunger for acceptance. "Unlike the Kennedy era," says Nicholas Lemann, author of The Promised Land, "Clinton's generation has already had its chance to make its tastes the country's tastes." Has it ever. Baby boomers -- especially the older ones like Clinton who were born in the 1940s -- have been pop-cultural imperialists since before Woodstock; the rest of America, like it or not, has had to endure their collective self-absorption as they metamorphosed from hippies to yuppies to competitive parenting. What is possibly left for them to gain from a Clinton presidency, other...
AUTHOR: NANCY LEMANN...
THEY MAY HAVE LOST THE CIVIL War, but in writing, Southerners often have a sublime authority that allows them to triumph even over thin or attenuated material. Take New Orleans-born Nancy Lemann, for example. Her new novel is very much like her first, the much praised Lives of the Saints (1985). In that book a gently bred young woman lives out a hopeless love for a charming drunk named Claude Collier. Not much plot there, but the story is peopled with New Orleans madcaps and eccentrics who go to parties that the author describes with just the right blend...
...pleasures of reading Lemann lie in her sure characterization and limpid style. If she has heard of Freud, she keeps it to herself. Her people, whether brisk and dignified or drunk and disorderly, are presented as distinct personalities whose actions, however odd, are inevitable and to be accepted. Little Al, age three, is impossibly wise. Margaret, from Memphis, is more than disorderly and is locked up regularly. But she is also "a glamour girl and old-style Southern belle." When the vignettes threaten to stretch credibility, Lemann unerringly interweaves a little writing just for its own sake, perhaps a nature...
...PROMISED LAND by Nicholas Lemann...