Word: novelistically
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...wheel from Rafsanjani last week. In recent months Rafsanjani has pursued better relations with Paris, seeing France as his gateway to the West. The U.S. is still perceived by many Iranians as the Great Satan, and bitter feelings linger from the feud with Britain over the safety of novelist Salman Rushdie, who was condemned to death in 1989 by the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini for his book The Satanic Verses. But France has been in a position to deal openly with Tehran since April 1990, when its last hostage was freed. Last month Paris agreed to return to Tehran $1 billion...
...quite a while before writers find an arena as morally complex or financially rewarding. Before World War II, the spy novelist usually took the low road: the hero was implausibly good, as in John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps. Evil was unambiguous. Sax Rohmer invested his villain, Fu Manchu, "with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race . . . the Yellow Peril incarnate." But in the postwar period the public grew weary of caricatures, and only Ian Fleming could profitably drive on the old thoroughfare, with men like Doctor No and Goldfinger in the backseat...
...easy for Isaac Bashevis Singer to believe in miracles. He was proof that they existed. In 1935 the rabbi's son journeyed from Warsaw to New York City to visit his brother, novelist Israel Joshua Singer, and thereby escaped the Holocaust. He described vanished worlds in a dying language to a dwindling audience and was awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was unknown at 40, but last week, when I.B. Singer died of a stroke at the age of 87, he was the most applauded Polish-born writer since Joseph Conrad...
Peter Benchley's 1974 best seller, Jaws, starred the shark that ate Long Island, became a smashing film and inspired a school of sequels. After some dry runs, the novelist has taken the plunge again. Beast (Random House; 350 pages; $21) features tentacles rather than mandibles. Otherwise it is the familiar mixture: lethal creature, relentless pursuers and vast quantities of saline solution. When waters off Bermuda become the killing grounds of a giant squid, tourism collapses. Whereupon an Ahabian fisherman, Whip Darling, clambers into a submarine and leads the hunt. All the old ingredients are present, from aqua horror...
...opening night, agitations grow and Ben becomes more and more indecisive until, like Hamlet, he begins having conversations with his late father. Fortunately, they are witty exchanges by two convincing characters. Then again, in The Best Revenge (Random House; 240 pages; $20) everyone is convincing. Along with Tennessee Williams, novelist Sol Stein was a member of the Playwrights Unit at the Actors Studio. His portrait of backstage back stabbing is as uncomfortable as it is amusing, but Stein obviously knows what he is writhing about...