Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Mexico is also home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, once the site of the Manhattan Project, the mother of all government secrets. Broadway Books is hoping it will have a best seller this summer with Los Alamos, a compelling and literate murder mystery from first-time novelist Joseph Kanon. Set amid the wartime development of the first atom bomb, the book has been compared to E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime for its intermingling of real and fictional characters. But a more apt comparison might be to the film Chinatown, with its small-scale moral muddles foregrounding grand-scale moral muddles...
...appetite for the real, the pragmatic and the scientifically verifiable had long been resident in 19th century America. But it was brought to a peak in the wake of the Civil War. The journalistic eye was equal, as a transmitter of (sometimes unbearable) reality, to that of the novelist or poet; the camera replaced the draftsman in reportage. This was new. American public culture was now driven by technique--the skills that built bridges and docks and railroads, the scientific laws that underwrote Americans' conquest of their environment. There was no ghost in the machine, only the machine itself...
...course, a clever person in this situation can find one thing to complain about: things have gotten too placid, too settled, too nice. Aren't we really happiest in times of great conflict and danger? The novelist Walker Percy raised this point in his essays years ago. "Why," he asked, "is [a] man apt to feel good in a very bad environment, say an old hotel on Key Largo during a hurricane?" Percy discussed the estrangement of the commuter passing through New Jersey: his needs are entirely satisfied, but he feels bad. "The Bomb would seem to be sufficient reason...
...regular program concluded with a gorgeous performance of Schumann's Op. 39 Liederkreis, a cycle from 1840, the legendary "year of song." Working with texts by the poet and novelist Joseph Eichendorff, Schumann dashed off these twelve songs in a few weeks in May--have you finished your term papers? The duo's singing and playing shared a similar exuberance. Upshaw's fierce glares and terror-filled voice in "Waldgespruch" (Wood Dialogue) were playfully evocative of the Schubert Erlkoening, while Goode evoked the Liszt "Wild Jagd" transcendental etude when a line of Eichendorff's mentioned "ein lustiges Jagd," a merry...
DIED. ANN PETRY, 88, African-American novelist who immortalized a grim Harlem street and its human casualties; in Old Saybrook, Conn. In The Street (1946), she shows how the hopes of its Harlem inhabitants were desiccated by a malevolent urban wasteland...