Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Trial of Elizabeth Cree (Doubleday; 261 pages; $22), three men sit side by side in the Reading Room of the British Museum. Gathered together by chance on this foggy September morning in 1880 are Karl Marx, of whom the world will hear more in the coming decades; a young novelist named George Gissing, destined for some success but nothing like Marx's influence; and John Cree, who has inherited enough money to spend his days in earnest research into the conditions of the London poor. So, what happens next? Well, the three men ... read their books...
Only a foolhardy or a thoroughly self-confident novelist would risk such a potential yawn inducer, and Peter Ackroyd decidedly belongs in the second category. The author of biographies of T.S. Eliot and Charles Dickens and of seven earlier novels, including The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and Chatterton, Ackroyd has moved skillfully and often between the provinces of fact and fiction, with particular attention paid to the muzzy, fuzzy border between the two. By the time the historical Marx and Gissing and the imagined Cree sit together in silence in the Reading Room, the books they choose not only...
...Information centers around Richard Tull, a ridiculously obscure, soon-to-be ex-novelist. Richard is of that most quintessentially English brand of heroes: he is a loser. (In fact, the first installations of Amis' novel appeared in an issue of Granta magazine called "Losers.") To some extent, the author embodies, in Richard the stereotypical English hatred of success. His (anti) hero is an unmitigated failure whose humiliations Amis delights in recounting...
...whose glib utopian novel, Amelior, has rocketed to the top of the bestseller list. Stupid, shallow and immensely popular, Gwyn resembles Tod Friendly, the ex-Nazi from Amis' last novel, Time's Arrow. Of course, the public laps up Amelior, as Richard (who, as a soon-to-be-ex-novelist, has plenty of time on his hands) begins to plot revenge...
Advance word on The Information was that it was a roman a clef of sorts about Amis' relationship with his friend, the novelist Julian Barnes. But Amis is too subtle for those kinds of games. Looking for the author in the text denies the fact thatThe Information is capable of standing...