Word: novelistically
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...last element -- the not unreasonable requirement that at least somebody in a thriller be interesting enough to spend an evening with -- is utterly absent from another much whooped crime novel about to reach the bookstores. It doesn't matter that the story comes from Rent-a-Plot in first novelist Scott Smith's A Simple Plan. The idea has worked before and will again: a couple of ordinary guys in northern Ohio stumble over a small plane crashed in the woods. The pilot is dead. The cargo is $3.5 million in used U.S. currency. Should they...
...with sufficient ego. "Only at 50," he admits, "did I fully realize I wanted to be an actor." At that point, Yes, Minister made a star of Hawthorne, who bears a striking resemblance to Ralph Richardson. In the past few years Hawthorne found roles that fully challenged him: as novelist-metaphysician C.S. Lewis in Shadowlands and as George III. The former brought him a 1991 Tony Award; the latter earned him, in the same year, London's Olivier Award. He is still deadpan-dismissive about his craft: "You have to understand that throughout life I have more or less played...
Sadly, this double edge is somewhat scarce in Love, Love, and Love. In far too many of these vignettes. Bernhard sounds like a Brat Pack novelist who thinks spare descriptions of lonely, confused people having sex, taking pills and spending money are inherently interesting. The longer pieces are rarely as insightful as the brief snippets, and the only identifiable story line--involving a disgruntled Parisian woman and her violent, international love life--falls particularly flat...
...Novelist Richard Powers is a prodigiously talented manufacturer of literary astonishments, which is not exactly the same as being a good writer, though he is that too. His novel The Gold Bug Variations was widely praised as one of the best books of 1991. But whenever one of his narratives loses its forward motion, as happens early in this big, messy, off-and-on brilliant novel, Powers tends to go for flash. He sets off skyrockets, then more skyrockets. Great, arcing bursts of language streak across not just pages but whole chapters. (On pollution: "Maroon-brown patinas of condensing...
Halberstam's omissions are less distracting than his unwillingness to go deeper into the era, especially since his authoritative tone suggests rather than delivers new and significant insights. The Fifties is more than an entertainment, but to borrow an image from novelist Peter DeVries, it puts you in a diving bell and takes you down three feet...