Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...really be true, after all, that Lonesome Dove, published in 1985, is the finest American novel since, let's say, The Naked and the Dead and Catch-22. Yet that's the contrary view here. McMurtry is a good, busy, workmanlike novelist, but except for that single volume, not a great one. An earlier novel, The Last Picture Show, caught scraps of magic with its misty recollection of long-gone boyhood. Terms of Endearment worked well and deserved its success. Some of the author's other modern-day fiction (Texasville; Evening Star) has been merely expert and forgettable...
...Coraghessan Boyle is an overpraised novelist with an unpleasant habit of sneering at his own cardboard characters," writes criticJohn Skow. Some writers can carry this off; Boyle definitely can't. His new novel (Viking; 355 pages; $23.95) has possibilities in its discussion of the shuddering distaste of California's Anglos for the Mexican illegals who perform the state's stoop labor. But the author mistrusts his skill and the reader's acuteness. "This is weak, obvious stuff," says Skow, "worth a raised eyebrow and a shrug...
...remember anything like it," says Ken Kesey, the post-hipster novelist (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest) and legendary ingester of psychedelic substances, who paints his old friend in heroic strokes. "Not Elvis, not John Lennon. The Beatles were great, but they were a studio band. And Elvis was great, but he was a good ole boy, not a revolutionary. Jerry has been a revolutionary, a warrior, as long as I've known him. He battled for the American soul, out there on the edge of a dangerous frontier--battling the forces of the Grinch, the forces of darkness...
...there be anything more tiresome than hearing--or reading--about someone else's quest for spiritual enlightenment? Such accounts always tend toward the deeply sincere and the totally humorless. Anita Desai is therefore an intrepid novelist indeed; her Journey to Ithaca (Knopf; 312 pages; $23) traces the pilgrimages of not one but three seekers after truth, spelled with a capital...
British comic novelist David Lodge has an endearing way of falling in love with his characters. In Nice Work (1991) he did a complete about-face, starting at a satirist's typical distance from his creations and finishing besotted with them. In Therapy (Viking; 321 pages; $22.95) he describes a classic case of postmodern depression. Laurence ("Tubby") Passmore is 58, securely married, the chief writer on a hit TV sitcom. But he quickly finds he has a trick knee, a fed-up wife and a bad threat...