Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Edmund White's Genet: A Biography (Knopf; 728 pages; $35) faces the problem of any book that would take the measure of a writer who so resoundingly fictionalized his own life. How can mere truth compete? White comes to his subject with the advantages of a gay novelist (A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty) and the author of thoughtful reportage about gay life (States of Desire) -- both roles in which he would have confronted Genet's compelling and problematic example long before he came to him as a biographer. Suitably equipped, White connects the facts...
...Browne's songs is no more useful than trying to map the depth of Scott Fitzgerald by counting the bottles it took to finish Tender Is the Night. But it may be no coincidence that one of Browne's songs got its title from that book. For both novelist and songwriter share a knowledge of the constraints of the spirit and the strain of love gone wild and wrong. Hurt may heal, but as Browne sings in All Good Things, even "the pleasure will mend." He knows the deepest wounds leave no visible scars...
...writing a column for TIME and want to demonstrate what a lame novelist Robert James Waller is. Easy, in every sense. I get a copy of Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend (which is published by Time Warner), pluck out a piece of lazy prose, and print it here: "A monkey called, sounding far and lonesome. The classic jungle sound from old Tarzan movies." Or I could go a step further and mimic Waller, as Billy Frolick does in his new book-length parody, The Ditches of Edison County ("Concave's scream echoed through the canyons and ditches of Edison County...
...have met the Curleys before. Under another name they are the central figures of novelist Roddy Doyle's Barrytown trilogy about working-class Irish folk, from which Doyle also adapted The Commitments for the screen. He's a writer who likes to pack lots of lively characters, talk and unpremeditated activity into relatively tight spaces, thereby creating the kind of lifelike untidiness, fractiousness and believable goofiness that American movie comedy, with its stress on easily summarizable concepts and subteen gag writing, can only dream about...
These Asian films are already spawning would-be imitators. "When something becomes a commercial success," says novelist Tan, "it automatically opens the door, or at least the possibility, for other similar ventures. Already, in Hollywood, I'm hearing about people saying, 'We think this will be another Joy Luck Club,' about films they want to get produced...