Word: life
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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McGuane, who has not had a drink in nine years, also credits his healthier frame of mind to the life-affirming influence of his wife Laurie, who is the mother of their daughter Annie, 9. An expert horsewoman in her own right, Laurie helps McGuane deal with his correspondence and critiques his first drafts. If she admits to noticing a change in her husband over the past few years, it is simply that he has become "less cynical...
Which perhaps explains his current fascination with the harmony found in the pedestrian rhythms of ordinary life. "The kind of place that really gives me a thrill now is a place like Chicago or Toledo or Buffalo, where you notice people rolling out and going to work in the morning," says McGuane. "After 50 years of living, it occurs to me that the most significant thing that people do is go to work, whether it is to go to work on their novel or the assembly plant or fixing somebody's teeth...
...world." Maintaining a primal connection to the environment is essential to McGuane, for both his peace of mind and his work. "I feel strongly that writers need to be some place," he says. "The real thing, the real job of artists of any kind is to somehow seize the life you're having in an unrelinquishing grip." McGuane is sure to continue doing exactly that. But, just in case, he keeps his epitaph handy. His eyes gleam with mischief as he repeats it: "No stone unturned -- except this...
Readers not familiar with Sinyavsky's style or the content of his life may have difficulty with the half-submerged facts. He was born into an affluent family in 1925. His father, who appears in the book as a brilliant though ineffectual figure out of a Chekhov play, was a revolutionary but not a Bolshevik. He was individualistic and something of an eccentric pragmatist. While waiting to be drafted during World War I, he practiced writing with his left hand in case he lost his right...
...dictator's toxic phantom pervades the book, which is the literary incarnation of Sinyavsky's public and private life. He admits that in 1948 he was asked by agents of the KGB to woo a fellow student, the daughter of a French naval attache. He complied without knowing their purpose or even the extent of his own motives. Years later, Sinyavsky put the intrigue to good use by enlisting the Frenchwoman to help smuggle his writings to the West...