Word: novelists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Only connect the prose and the passion," wrote British novelist E.M. Forster, "and both will be exalted." Zadie Smith's third novel, On Beauty, does, and they are. Beautifully written, it is - like her debut best seller White Teeth - essentially a story about families, expansive enough to encompass questions of race, Rembrandt, aging gracefully (or not), love, fidelity and, as the title suggests, recognizing what is truly beautiful and how we make it a part of our lives. Smith, as she makes clear in her acknowledgments, is indebted to Forster for more than good advice. On Beauty is a rambunctious...
When a book becomes a movie, the novelist goes from author to spectator--always a bewildering transition, even more so when the book in question is based on his life. For me the process began about four years ago, three years after the novel's publication, when writer-director Mike Mills invited me to his house in California to discuss his adaptation of the book. He had shortened the time span of the narrative, combined several young female characters into one and focused on the protagonist's complex relationship with his unhappy mother. He had improved my work, in other...
...detail is, Memoirs provides far too much of it. The chase, often gripping, also goes on too long, though the bond between Halloway and his relentless chief pursuer -- the one person he can talk to and who truly understands him -- lends an intriguing psychological edge to the action. First Novelist H.F. Saint, 46, a Manhattan businessman, clearly knows his financial world and takes it none too seriously. Analysts, brokers, commodities traders are all wickedly caricatured, and in one of the book's most fascinating passages, Halloway's invisibility affords sweet revenge on the market's greed and phoniness. In need...
...himself on paper or in person; when he uses his invisibility, clumsily, to filch $2,200 from the cash drawer of a bank, he is so conscience-stricken that he returns the money before closing time. Fred Wagner, a copywriter for a mail-order catalog and a would-be novelist, is the sort of wimp whose wife of four years would leave him out of "contempt for his habitual failure to claim justice from the petty tyrants of quotidian life." One day he discovers that he can simply will himself, and anything he is touching, into invisibility and back again...
...Well you can't keep a good novelist down, and 79 pages into Coetzee's first book since the Swedish Academy lauded the "icy precision" of his prose, Elizabeth is back, as hot and blustery as the wind off the desert. Until this point, Slow Man (Knopf; 265 pages) has been about the unraveling of retired photographer Paul Rayment in Adelaide. After his bicycle is clipped by a car, he loses first his leg, then his dignity and, perhaps, his mind. Dour of disposition and without family, he's drawn to his hot-blooded Croatian nurse, Marijana Jokic, whose troublesome...