Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...humanism, decency, and commitment to freedom. White's character and achievement must be weighed against the sickness to which his sensitivity exposed him and against the shrillness of those who could accept him only by condescending to him as a humorist. What American letters might have lost in a novelist it gained in an essayist; and what culture might have missed in a hero it found in a sensible, if limited...
...worst is to live through the ordeal that follows: to submit. The suicides, the alcoholism, the mists of despair that today envelop many reservations all seem legacies of a colonial past that won't go away. "Winter in the blood" is the way James Welch, the Montana Blackfeet novelist, describes the consequences--a freezing up of the Indian psyche in the face of daily deprivations of the spirit. "I was," he writes, "as distant from myself as the hawk from the moon...
...enough writers here to form a dissident branch of the Soviet Writers' Union," Aksyonov ironically observes. A member of the official union for 18 years and the U.S.S.R.'s most popular living novelist, Aksyonov was pressured to leave the country when he edited an anthology of unorthodox Russian writing that the union deemed subversive. The collection, entitled Metropol, which includes an excerpt of a comic play by Aksyonov, was published in the U.S. by W.W.Norton...
...Novelist Yuz Aleshkovsky, 54, views all forbidden topics as the domain of farce. The comic artist had to support himself in the Soviet Union writing children's books. Now he has returned to adult fiction with gusto. His raunchiest work, Nikolai Nikolayevich, is a Russian Portnoy's Complaint. In Aleshkovsky's book, as in Philip Roth's novel, the hero spends most of his time masturbating. The Russian, however, finds an ingenious way to turn his obsession into a cushy government job when a Soviet laboratory purchases his prodigious production of spermatozoa for the greater glory...
DIED. Jessamyn West, 81, gentle-spirited novelist and short-story writer, best known for her first collection of stories, The Friendly Persuasion, about a Quaker family on the Indiana frontier during the Civil War; in Napa, Calif. Born into a Quaker family (Richard Nixon is her distant cousin), West set much of her fiction in her native Indiana, although she lived most of her life in California. "I am by all I know a Californian," she once said, "and by all I imagine a Hoosier...