Word: novelistically
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...ambivalent about his work than he dares to admit. The latter is bustling, voluble and perhaps more sympathetic toward Strike--with everyone trying to survive in this milieu--than he cares to admit. Clockers is careful not to overexplain these figures. Director Spike Lee, who shares screenplay credit with novelist Richard Price, lets Phifer (in his first film role) and Keitel (in his umpty-umpth) find the characters, which they do with unimprovable unpredictability...
...glamorously seedy plot of David Ramus' new thriller, Thief of Light (HarperCollins; 291 pages; $23), that has the publishing world abuzz. It is the eerie similarity between the fictional story and that of the author. Ramus, a wan Alec Baldwin look-alike, is a first-time novelist with a potential best seller in his future, and also a possible prison sentence. Like his protagonist, in the '80s he was an art dealer with a fondness for heroin. By the '90s he had overcome his drug problems, but questionable business dealings left him with a $4 million debt and allegations...
...autobiographical tinge that clouds the distinction between the author and his creation: the shameless, self-destructive rebel who wants to be remembered as a "Beloved Whoremonger, Seducer, Sodo mist, Abuser of Women, Destroyer of Morals, Ensnarer of Youth." There should be no confusion between Sabbath the puppeteer and the novelist who pulls the strings. Of course, there will...
...really be true, after all, that Lonesome Dove, published in 1985, is the finest American novel since, let's say, The Naked and the Dead and Catch-22. Yet that's the contrary view here. McMurtry is a good, busy, workmanlike novelist, but except for that single volume, not a great one. An earlier novel, The Last Picture Show, caught scraps of magic with its misty recollection of long-gone boyhood. Terms of Endearment worked well and deserved its success. Some of the author's other modern-day fiction (Texasville; Evening Star) has been merely expert and forgettable...
T.Coraghessan Boyle is an overpraised novelist with an unpleasant habit of sneering at his own cardboard characters. Some writers can carry this off, some can't. Aldous Huxley adopted a toplofty attitude toward his creatures, but he had the intellectual force to transform snobbery into satire. Among current novelists, Martin Amis lacks intellectual force but is well supplied with nastiness, which occasionally resembles humor. Boyle merely sounds as if he needs an antacid...