Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Supreme Court just ordered two of them, the Ivy Club and the Tiger Inn, to admit women, provoking a few harrumphs and a few more shrugs. Social posturing was taken more seriously in the '50s. Still, readers may feel that the hero's affronted psyche is a bit fragile. Novelist John O'Hara, who never went to college, used to be fascinated by this sort of folderol, and his friends joked about taking up a collection to send him to Princeton. Wolff is a skilled memoirist (The Duke of Deception) and novelist (Inklings), but maybe somebody should arrange a scholarship...
...pulling down the clouds like a monarch shrugging into a cloak. No other city's history so embodies the idea of innovation and achievement in such a dazzling range of human endeavors. "There is no place like it, no place with an atom of its glory, pride and exultancy," novelist Thomas Wolfe rhapsodized in 1935. "It lays its hand upon a man's bowels; he grows drunk with ecstasy; he grows young and full of glory, he feels that he can never...
...What spy novelist Len Deighton tries here must be nearly impossible: winding up a closely plotted six-volume thriller -- lugging all the bodies offstage and making sure that each one has a tag attached to a toe -- and still writing a creditable novel. He makes a good job of it with a clever change of focus...
Bolivar died in 1830 at age 47, probably from tuberculosis. The Nobel- prizewinning novelist only suggests the cause of death, allowing the disease to spread subtly into metaphor. As ex-President Bolivar passes through corrupting cities and pestilential villages on the way to retirement, his dream of "one nation, free and unified, from Mexico to Cape Horn," collapses as surely as his consumptive lungs. Fever inspires delirious memories of battlefield victories and bedroom intrigues. Ideals, glory, vitality and hope are overgrown by failures...
Neither version is completely true. More to the point, neither is dramatically convincing. The febrile mind and bodily functions of the famous dead are not off limits to a novelist, especially one of Garcia Marquez's talents. Yet in this novel his fabulist's imagination is overburdened by research. Historical names, dates and events frequently interrupt the mood that has been so carefully prepared to characterize Bolivar's last ride. True, Garcia Marquez unhorses a legend distorted by politics and patinaed by sentimentality, but Bolivar did a pretty good job of it himself. Schoolchildren may know him as the George...