Word: novelists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
WHEN ASKED by friend to describe his visit to Nicaragua, Indian novelist Salman Rushdie replied, "I've been taking snapshots....There's not much more one can do in a few weeks." He was right. In The Jaguar Smile, the result of his three week stay in the embattled country last summer, Rushdie attempts to bring reality to a controversy too often plagued by abstraction. But while his two-dimensional snapshots do not make for a convincing political argument, Rushdie does succeed in injecting a startling dose reality into the otherwise hollow debate over U.S. Central American policy...
...tell right off when a novelist knows his way around the block. Take the first sentence of Larry McMurtry's moody, sensitive, ironic yet lightheartedly despairing new novel: "Duane was in the hot tub, shooting at his new doghouse with a .44 Magnum." The Jamesian restraint of the language -- not "Blam, blam, blam, wood chips glinted in the dusty air," but a dreamlike, almost passive kind of doghouse blasting -- foreshadows subtle stuff. The hero, we sense, is a country boy (the name Duane, and the implication that there is enough vacant acreage behind the doghouse so that stray bullets...
Left to herself, Adele is rewarded with the life she always wanted -- based solely on appearance. She goes "from one perfect outfit to the next . . . Someone could always be watching." This obsession with surfaces is contagious: First Novelist Simpson also suffers from it. She uses brand names and meticulous descriptions of the ordinary to build an appearance of reality, but beneath the book's carefully crafted details there is not quite enough of the breath or pulse of life...
...Broadway audiences were chilled by The Bad Seed. The title character of that melodrama was a homicidal moppet whose appearance was so angelic that no one but her mother suspected the hidden crimes. British Novelist B.M. Gill has given the premise a sardonic twist: in Nursery Crimes, wicked little Zanny repeatedly confesses to several murders but is so widely disbelieved that she concludes her sins are minor, subject to a penance of three Hail Marys. At home, at school, in church and even among the police, grownups fail her. The story's most compelling relationship unfolds between Zanny...
...collaboration, there is not much to celebrate. For one thing, a cool million no longer induces the slack-jawed awe it once did; everyone knows that insider traders on Wall Street can steal that much before lunch. And British Author Sally Beauman is not really a first novelist. She has written nine Harlequin romances under a pseudonym...