Word: novelistically
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...novelist who puts himself into his story is either a Postmodernist or uncommonly vain. Vidal is not a Postmodernist, but he probably deserves a place in his chronicle. He knew or met a number of the real, historical people--Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph Alsop, Tennessee Williams--who move through the pages of The Golden Age. He has been, for the past half-century, an uncommonly public literary figure: a near ubiquitous television guest and, twice, an unsuccessful candidate for elective office. Living well is Vidal's revenge, which he does much of each year at La Rondinaia, his spectacular house...
...Lampoon product would be complete without a mention of Thomas Pynchon, and the Guide to College Admissions obliges (see p. 148, and maybe others that I missed). The Lampoon's collective obsession with Pynchon is bizarre, and probably beyond my ability to explain. Pynchon the novelist is inaccessible, just like the 'Poon. Very few people make it all the way through his books, just like very few people can read an entire issue of the Lampoon. And people who do read Pynchon get to feel like they're part of a special intellectual club - just like the Lampoon thinks...
...story is clear eyed, richly detailed and riveting, mainly because of his shrewd feelings for the nuances of Kennedy's character and internal conflicts. In late May 1968, during the California primary campaign, Kennedy attended a party at the Malibu beach house of director John Frankenheimer. The novelist Romain Gary, husband of actress Jean Seberg, fastened onto Kennedy and said, brutally, "You know, don't you, that somebody is going to kill you?" A few days later, when he was 42, somebody did. Bobby Kennedy vanished to become an item of America's counterfactual history. What if? Who knows...
...novelist who puts himself into his story is either a Postmodernist or uncommonly vain. Vidal is not a Postmodernist, but he probably deserves a place in his chronicle. He knew or met a number of the real, historical people - Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph Alsop, Tennessee Williams - who move through the pages of "The Golden Age." He has been, for the past half-century, an uncommonly public literary figure: a near ubiquitous television guest and, twice, an unsuccessful candidate for elective office. Living well is Vidal's revenge, which he does much of each year at La Rondinaia, his spectacular house...
...There were not enough foster homes for them, and many lived for months in unheated summer-vacation camps. A few were exploited; many were troubled. One could argue that these 10,000 were pathetically few compared with the 6 million lost in the Holocaust. But one of the Kinder, novelist Lore Segal, makes this poignant point: "None of the foster parents with whom I stayed, and there were five of them, could stand me for very long, but all of them had the grace to take in a Jewish child." That was a quality singularly lacking elsewhere (particularly...