Word: nathanael
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Anyone who reads has toured parts of this fun house before. Budd Schulberg and Nathanael West spurned it in novels. Elderly actresses and directors have told gaudy lies to their tape recorders. What Author Otto Friedrich contributes in City of Nets (Harper & Row; 512 pages; $25) is a lucid, darkly funny recounting that threads the loopy stories and the titanic egos into a coherent narrative. Friedrich, a TIME senior writer, clearly cherishes the surreal nuttiness of Hollywood's great days...
...generation, Perelman absorbed himself in pulp literature and vaudeville. When he became a cartoonist and writer at Brown University, the melodramatic phrase coupled with the antic gesture were indispensable parts of his technique. Another campus satirist derived from the same origins: Nathan Weinstein, soon to be better known as Nathanael West, the author of Miss Lonelyhearts. The two men were close friends, then relatives when Perelman married West's sister Laura. It was not, Herrmann reports, a conventional union. Early on, the Perelmans went to Hollywood, where a fellow scenarist, Dashiell Hammett, once noted, "Last night I ran into...
Unless, of course, Glynn is telling the gag as a shaggy-building story. He floods the eye and ear with bizarre images and improvised prose. It is as if the plumbing in a conventional novel had burst, swirling the styles of Gunter Grass, Nathanael West, William Burroughs, Stanley Elkin, John Irving and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (without the enchantment of a safe distance and exotic folklore...
There is a breathless scene in Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust when the hero is caught in a street riot and is carried every way the mob heaves: "He was the spearhead of a flying wedge when it collided with a mass going in the opposite direction. The impact turned him around. As the two forces ground against each other, he was turned again and again, like a grain between millstones. This didn't stop until he became part of the opposing force...
...mysteriously draws people to him like a whirlpool. Nick Maneuso's Eli handsome and well groomed enough to be a Ken doil, and he's just as dull lot awhile, but blanketed intensity and final indignation are all the mere effective in the end Heartbreakers is updated look at Nathanael West The Day of the "dream dump," modern day Los Angeles, those who state are all dissatisfied and spend she then days and might pretending they...