Word: novelization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...result is that his modest, strikingly unguarded second novel, a simple story of decency and wandering, has been subjected to the kind of buildup generally reserved for the memoirs of presidential mistresses. Still living in an old house on an island in Puget Sound, Guterson says he felt no pressure from having to live up to his miraculous debut and the succeeding five years of expectations. "I'm scared enough when I sit down to write," he says disarmingly, "that there isn't a lot of extra fright that goes with having a best-selling novel behind me." Besides, East...
East of the Mountains is best read, perhaps, as a kind of firelit Steinbeck Western about how a deliberate man learns the virtues of having his plans overturned and comes to embrace a life he'd all but given up on. Some readers may find the novel a little too sweet-spirited and lacking in a strong enough sense of evil to make the triumphs of goodness seem earned. Yet as a response to best-sellerdom, the book--and its author--has the bravery to strike off in a new direction. The intrinsic difficulties of completing a novel, says Guterson...
...must have seemed like a good idea at the onset: Why not retell the mythic story of Orpheus and Eurydice, this time casting the principals as international pop/rock stars? Ergo Salman Rushdie's sixth novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Henry Holt; 575 pages; $27.50), which recounts the fabulous lives and careers of the singer-composer Ormus Cama and his beloved co-vocalist Vina Apsara, as remembered by their mutual friend, the news photographer Umeed ("Rai") Merchant. His opening sentence foretells Vina's death--she was swallowed up by an earthquake in Mexico in 1989--and Rai presents himself...
That "all of it, every last detail" seems a tad superfluous; readers who haul this hefty novel onto their lap will already have guessed that they're in for a long trek. And for quite a while the journey seems enchanting indeed. Rai's account of his and Ormus' Bombay childhood becomes a pageant of Dickensian, subcontinent eccentrics, particularly the boys' diversely obsessed parents...
Bombay is obviously too small to hold these two myth-destined figures, and Rai decides to get out as well. ("Disorientation: loss of the East," as he notes several times.) But this exodus considerably saps the narrative vigor of Rushdie's novel. On their arc toward pop immortality, Ormus and Vina must inevitably pass through London in the mid-'60s and Manhattan in the '70s, already over-storied places and times about which Rai (and Rushdie) can find little new or interesting to add. When fictionalized versions of Rudolf Nureyev and Andy Warhol start popping up, an inspired fiction dwindles...