Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fiction writer Jonathan Franzen faced that fact last year in a long, fretful article in Harper's magazine. "The novelist," he wrote, "has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture...
...Despite his achievements, Dorris' life was plagued by hardship. In 1991, his adopted son, Reynold Abel, died after being hit by a car. In 1995 another adopted son, Jeffrey, was was put on trial for trying to extort $15,000 from him. The impending divorce from his wife, the novelist Louise Erdrich, added to his travails. Dorris, who was working on a follow-up to "The Broken Cord" entitled "Matter of Conscience," was on leave as an English professor at Dartmouth at the time of his death...
...parliament, the populated rubble of Chechnya, the return of the unhonored prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the offices of the new business czars, and the salons of Moscow's intelligentsia. He likes to put you in a room where important people carry on thought-provoking discussions. In one intense conversation, satirical novelist Vladimir Voinovich laments that the party big shots and KGB bosses quickly betrayed the ideology they had imposed on hundreds of millions of people, while democrats, including Yeltsin, still walk, talk and "act like the old Soviet leaders...
...began when best-selling vampire novelist Anne Rice took out a full-page ad in the New Orleans Times-Picayune going for the neck of a fellow celebrity for opening an "absolutely hideous" restaurant on one of her hometown's most famous avenues...
...little industrial-strength over-writing never hurt a thriller about mean streets in the big city, and first novelist Thomas Kelly knows when to break out the purple ink in Payback (Knopf; 273 pages; $23). "Billy peered over the edge of the roof," Kelly writes. "Far below, the life of the city surged through the streets like the blood of a great snarling beast, unimpeded by his concerns. He was just one more fool in its hard history who'd gotten in over his head." Good magenta stuff, requiring only a little Hammond-organ ominoso to sound like the musings...