Word: novelistically
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Clare Campion, 42, a successful novelist living in New York City, pays one of her infrequent visits home to Mountain City in western North Carolina. There she finds her mother Lily, her stepfather Ralph Quick and her two half brothers, Theo, 28, and Rafe, 26, all of them behaving incorrigibly in character and thereby reminding Clare of why she had left them and the South in the first place. Her only respite from what she calls "the ongoing theatricals of the family" is the companionship of her childhood friend Julia Richardson. Years earlier, Julia gave up a promising career...
...best known is Joan Didion, a native Californian with literary and intellectual power bases in Los Angeles and Manhattan. Lengthy excerpts from her book, simply titled Miami (Simon & Schuster; 240 pages; $17.95), appeared over the summer in the New York Review of Books. Didion's credentials as ; novelist and essayist are well established. Play It as It Lays set the '70s standard for Southern California malaise, and her journalism was carefully calibrated to record fine cracks in sanity and personal relationships. She has expanded more recent reportage and fiction (Salvador, Democracy) to poke along the fault lines of the commonweal...
...proposal, ghostwritten by Novelist Les Whitten, portrayed the plucky heroine rebuffing Nelson Rockefeller when he surprised her in the shower "wearing nothing more than a puckish smile" and backing out of a bedroom encounter with Robert Kennedy. When the predictable furor erupted, Braden claimed she was an author wronged: her literary agent submitted the proposal without her final approval. "Of course, Joan approved it," says Braden's agent. "She's just getting cold feet." Braden does not deny the incidents in the manuscript. But they may be blue-penciled from a presumably tamer version she is planning with her husband...
...embroiled in its practice then. Those who possessed and those who were possessed struggled, like most people at all times, everywhere, to get through their days; neither history nor the exigencies of survival allowed them much time for meditation or outrage. To portray the texture of such lives, a novelist must be willing to forgo reflective indignation and let the characters and details speak for themselves...
Much has been made of George Higgins' gift of gab and nose for original sin. Much should be made. Since The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972), the lawyer- novelist has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is more than a prolific genre writer about Boston's hoods and pols. His 13 novels have moved steadily beyond a cynical cop's-eye view toward a harsh realism that is informed by experience, reflection and cauterizing...