Word: novelistically
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...Coraghessan Boyle is an overpraised novelist with an unpleasant habit of sneering at his own cardboard characters," writes criticJohn Skow. Some writers can carry this off; Boyle definitely can't. His new novel (Viking; 355 pages; $23.95) has possibilities in its discussion of the shuddering distaste of California's Anglos for the Mexican illegals who perform the state's stoop labor. But the author mistrusts his skill and the reader's acuteness. "This is weak, obvious stuff," says Skow, "worth a raised eyebrow and a shrug...
...remember anything like it," says Ken Kesey, the post-hipster novelist (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest) and legendary ingester of psychedelic substances, who paints his old friend in heroic strokes. "Not Elvis, not John Lennon. The Beatles were great, but they were a studio band. And Elvis was great, but he was a good ole boy, not a revolutionary. Jerry has been a revolutionary, a warrior, as long as I've known him. He battled for the American soul, out there on the edge of a dangerous frontier--battling the forces of the Grinch, the forces of darkness...
...there be anything more tiresome than hearing--or reading--about someone else's quest for spiritual enlightenment? Such accounts always tend toward the deeply sincere and the totally humorless. Anita Desai is therefore an intrepid novelist indeed; her Journey to Ithaca (Knopf; 312 pages; $23) traces the pilgrimages of not one but three seekers after truth, spelled with a capital...
British comic novelist David Lodge has an endearing way of falling in love with his characters. In Nice Work (1991) he did a complete about-face, starting at a satirist's typical distance from his creations and finishing besotted with them. In Therapy (Viking; 321 pages; $22.95) he describes a classic case of postmodern depression. Laurence ("Tubby") Passmore is 58, securely married, the chief writer on a hit TV sitcom. But he quickly finds he has a trick knee, a fed-up wife and a bad threat...
TIME's R.Z. Sheppard says that if novelist and sometime National Public Radio commentator Andrei Codrescu continues with the kinks and Gothic whoopee of his new book (Simon & Schuster; 347 pages; $23), he could become as rich as Anne Rice. The only thing that may hold him back is his attempt to thicken his plot with serious themes. The story centers on Elizabeth Bathory, a real life 16th century Hungarian tyrant alleged to have killed 650 girls in the belief that bathing in their blood would preserve her youth and beauty. Codrescu pleats the 16th and 20th centuries together address...