Word: novelistically
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British comic novelist David Lodge has an endearing way of falling in love with his characters. It is a habit that saves his latest novel (Viking; 321 pages; $22.95) from becoming an all-too-familiar tale of midlife crisis. Lawrence "Tubby" Passmore is 58 and securely married with a job he loves. But he quickly finds all is not as secure as he believed. Tubby's attempts to recover make for neither enterprising nor funny reading, says TIME's Martha Duffy. But a meeting with a teenage love redeems both Passmore and the book. "By subtle shifts in tone," says...
...with Iran-contra. Webb, another true battlefield hero (Navy Cross, Silver Star, two Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts), was no hot dog but rather, in many ways, the smartest and best of the bunch. After the typically bitter homecoming from the war, he forged a career as a novelist, writing the best battlefield novel of Vietnam, Fields of Fire. During the Reagan Administration, he had a brief and stormy tenure as Secretary of the Navy...
Spiraling gracefully toward that conclusion, Cartwright, a novelist with film experience, often becomes the target of his own satire. At the center of the story is S.O. Letterman, a movie producer who starts off high-minded and ends with his eye on the box office. Letterman does not give a rat's rump for historical truth. Tim Curtiz, a London-based journalist taking a crack at a lucrative script-writing assignment, does. The subject of the movie, called Masai Dreams, is a striking French anthropologist named Claudia Cohn-Casson, whose work among the Masai, and whose fate at the hands...
...when Conroy writes about the pleasures of eating boiled crab on tables covered with yesterday's newspaper, when he celebrates the low country's amphibious charms or confronts his mixed feelings about bubba culture, there are flashes of a gifted novelist. That would be the Pat Conroy who wrote The Water Is Wide and The Great Santini, not the maker of what is certain to be this summer's best-selling snack...
DIED. STANLEY ELKIN, 65, darkly witty, language-obsessed novelist; of a heart attack; in St. Louis, Missouri. Author of 17 books, Elkin won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 for George Mills, which-in a plot typical of his absurdist bent-follows a thousand-year lineage of losers with the same name, from a misguided medieval crusader to a furniture mover in present-day St. Louis. Elkin remained a prolific writer despite suffering from multiple sclerosis...