Word: novelistic
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...almost always a mistake for readers to confuse the first person singular with the novelist. Almost. Conan Doyle was not John H. Watson, M.D. Samuel Clemens was not Huckleberry Finn. And Raymond Chandler was not Philip Marlowe. But, as his letters reveal, no author ever verged closer to his creation...
...references to young Raymond who wrote "clever and snotty" critiques for an English periodical. That occupation later made him suspicious of all critics, including W.H. Auden, who praised his works as art, and Edmund Wilson. At the age of 51, the schoolboy raised on Latin and Greek becomes a novelist (The Big Sleep, 1939), trying to make the detective story "respectable and even dignified." It grew so respectable that Chandler could laugh when S. J. Perelman parodied Marlowe's hard-boiled approach in "Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer": "Her eyes narrowed. I shifted my 200 Ibs. slightly, lazily set fire...
...Henry Miller, S.J. Perelman and Walt Whitman had holed up in a Michigan roadhouse to concoct a mystery yarn, the resulting melange of cosmic erotica, snappish humor and hirsute lyricism might resemble this send-up of the "tecs" by Poet and Novelist Jim Harrison (Farmer, Legends of the Fall). His mock hero, Johnny Lundgren, nicknamed Warlock, is a reluctant Swedish-American gumshoe who has been fired from his job as a foundation executive. He flees to the comforting semi-poverty of rural northern Michigan where irrelevance turns to comic Scandinavian angst. Trysts in his overheated Subaru prove difficult; his forays...
...stopped performing because I don't have the temperament of a performer. You have to want to do the same thing over and over again. Once I got it right, I didn't want to do it again. I always use the analogy of a novelist who has to read his novel in public night after night. I just didn't want to do it," Lehrer says. "And also," he adds in an obviously well-rehearsed phrase, "I had no more desire for anonymous affection." Those reasons, plus a distaste for travel ("Once you've been to Detroit there...
What we hear in Tolstoi or Flaubert or Dickens or Proust, wrote Novelist Mary McCarthy, "is the voice of a neighbor relating the latest gossip." Literature coalesces out of base gossip, from Suetonius to Boswell's Journals to Diana Trilling's new account (Mrs. Harris) of the Scarsdale Diet doctor's murder...