Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Wolfe's manifesto is crammed with an account of his rationale for writing Bonfire. He says he wanted to create a novel about New York City in the manner of Zola's and Balzac's novels about Paris or Thackeray's Vanity Fair. He kept waiting for some novelist to encompass the great phenomena of the age -- the hippie movement, say, or racial clashes or the Wall Street boom. But no one came forward. "It had been only yesterday, in the 1930s, that the big realistic novel, with its broad social sweep, had put American literature on the world stage...
...Wolfe's jeremiad, the "puppet-masters" of the American literary scene imported a new pantheon of foreign literary gods -- Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The "headlong rush" to get rid of realism, Wolfe complains, resulted in statements like that of experimental novelist John Hawkes, "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme...
...there are also some strong dissenters. Novelist John Updike, for example, despite receiving favorable mention from Wolfe, is not amused by the manifesto. "It's the sort of thing ((Wolfe)) says," he complains. "It seems sort of self-serving and superficially felt. It seems to me that isms, including Magical Realism and Minimalism, are all honorable alternatives to being realistic." Updike is echoed by fellow novelist John Barth, whom Wolfe calls "the peerless leader" of the retreat from realism for his "neo- fabulist" style. Barth says Wolfe's manifesto "is much too narrow a view. I see the feast...
...thunderation, the first of four in a reported $30 million to $40 million publishing deal, the author plays with a twist of the old good-twin, bad-twin theme. Novelist Thad Beaumont, who lives in Maine (as does King), collided with writer's block a few years ago and rescued his career by writing four novels under the pseudonym of George Stark (just as King has written five novels as Richard Bachman). These tales, unlike Beaumont's, were violent, brutal and very successful. Now Beaumont, writing on his own again, wants to bury Stark...
...kind of man many Japanese admire -- handsome and well tailored, an avid yachtsman and tennis player, successful politician and novelist. But what makes Shintaro Ishihara, 57, one of the most popular figures in Japan these days is his unapologetic view of the country's pre-eminence on the world stage. As a corollary, he warns the U.S. that its days as a leading economic and industrial power are numbered and that it ignores Japanese interests and sensibilities at its peril...