Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Dick of the Central Intelligence Agency, with a volume that ran to more than 1,300 pages. A second installment is in progress. Meantime, the industrious Mailer offers Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery (Random House; 828 pages; $30), a kind of nonfiction psychobiography in which he turns his novelist's imagination to the '60s origin myth, John Kennedy's assassination. Oswald's Tale can be judged as investigative journalism or as literature. On either count a fair judgment would be favorable, though mixed. Sunshine and clouds. As in much of Mailer's work, moments of real inspiration and breathtaking...
Next, the novelist who gleefully mocked ambition and avarice in Success, Money and London Fields displayed his own ambition and avarice. He demanded and eventually got from the English publisher HarperCollins, U.K., an advance of nearly £500,000 (almost $800,000) for his latest novel. In the process, he tossed over his longtime British agent and friend, Pat Kavanagh, for a more aggressive U.S. representative, Andrew Wylie, called "the Jackal" by publishers and rivals because of his opportunistic business style...
Most American writers would applaud a talented colleague's fat advances, if only out of self-interest: big, highly publicized deals raise the negotiating floor for everyone. But Amis' grab offended the sensibilities of some of his English literary colleagues. One was novelist Julian Barnes, who had a good reason: he's the husband of Kavanagh, Amis' former agent. Another was A.S. Byatt, whose novel Possession was published by Jonathan Cape, who also brought out Amis' previous novels. "I don't see why I should subsidize his greed," said Byatt, "simply because he has a divorce...
That The Information is about literary envy complicates the story. Amis denies that the book is a roman e clef, and indeed, the characters are too over the top for positive identification. Martin Amis, the son of novelist Kingsley Amis, has always been eager to show that he can juggle words better and push satire further than his competition, including Dad. But there are limits, and they are beginning to show...
...passeth all understanding, Vietnam may be the war that passeth all understanding. In the following pages, as we convey the panic and heroism of Saigon's last hours and describe Vietnam as it is today, as we explore the myths of the lessons of the war and offer a novelist's meditation on its end, we hope to shed some light on a place where memory burns, but darkness still prevails...