Word: metroland
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...creative" job, sensible wife, pretty child, starter home in Metroland, the generic name for London's middle-class suburbia. Chris (Christian Bale) also has something he doesn't need: his best friend from the swinging '60s, a wandering poet named Toni (Lee Ross), who lurches back into his life in the late '70s to taunt and tempt him. The taunts are about the road not taken--abandoned career in photography, abandoned girlfriend (sweet, sexy Elsa Zylberstein) from his years in Paris. The temptation is to return to youthful irresponsibility...
There's honesty and energy in the film's flashbacking pursuit of that thought. But Chris' lasting luck is his wife Marion. Emily Watson plays her as a kind of dream nanny--knowing, ironic, tolerant of his erotic nostalgia and not as prim as she looks. She, and Metroland, finally make a good, subtle case for the bearable weightiness of middle-class being, for the higher morality of muddling through...
...number of international prizes, including the Somerset Maugham Award for Metroland (published in 1980) as well as the French Prix Medicis. His name is invoked in hushed reverential tones whenever there is speculation about candidates for the Booker Prize (Britain's prestigious literary award). He acknowledges that he is not writing for the average library borrower (or one suspects the little old lady from Dubuque), yet his work is not inaccessible...
...worked at the New Spectator (a liberal British magazine), as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary, and as a television critic for The Observer, all the while working on what would be his first published novel Metroland...