Word: nathanael
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...same awe that the other two names evoke. For Christians, it is the town where Gabriel announced to Mary that she would be the mother of God, the town where Jesus grew up. But even in Biblical times it suffered from a bad press. When the apostle Philip told Nathanael that the Messiah had come from Nazareth, the Gospel of John reports, the incredulous answer was, "Can anything good come out of that place?" In modern times, tourist buses have generally stopped only long enough for the passengers to buy carved wooden camels and make a quick trip...
Wildly improbable as these goings-on may be, Novelist Stephen Jones has a gift for sweet and savage satire reminiscent of that unwholesome trio: Nikolai Gogol, Nathanael West and Samuel Beckett. His characters parody themselves in obsessive dead-end conversations, groping their way circularly past each other through muddled clouds of private thought and uncertain motive. In this first novel, his descriptions of hotels, restaurants, odd corners of small towns and the seedy people who inhabit them, haunt the mind's eye. Yet Jones' real talent is for making the improbable seem necessary and the grotesque plausibly humdrum...
Leave he does, for an assignment in Hollywood, only to find his Salzburg companions arriving daily-adrift, usually broke, looking for movie money. Behrman's glimpse of Hollywood will not trouble the ghosts of novelists Evelyn Waugh and Nathanael West, but he does focus on something these satirists missed. Behrman's Hollywood is like a latter-day Paris or Geneva-an asylum for talented refugees who in fact fled to the area in the late...
There is more P. G. Wodehouse in The Do-Gooders than the deadly amoral wit of Bruce Jay Friedman or Joseph Heller. The true black humorists spring from Franz Kafka, Céline, James Joyce and Nathanael West. Imitations like this owe their origins to the pop-art Campbell soup cans, underground "art" movies, and the overpowering amplification systems that give rock music its driving force...
Americans who deplore crime and disorder might consider the case of Andy Warhol, who for years has celebrated every form of licentiousness. Like some Nathanael West hero, the pop-art king was the blond guru of a nightmare world, photographing depravity and calling it truth. He surrounded himself with freakily named people-Viva, Ultra Violet, International Velvet, Ingrid Superstar-playing games of lust, perversion, drug addiction and brutality before his crotchety cameras. Last week one of his grotesque bit players made the game quite real...