Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...noisy irrelevancy; a neighbor (Denholm Elliott) who expresses love by being socially obliging; a best friend (Dianne Wiest) who is obscurely tense; and Peter (Sam Waterston), the ad man who rented the guest cottage on the property and then failed in two obvious duties: he didn't finish the novel he intended to write there, and he didn't fall in love with his landlady...
William Kennedy's novel Ironweed was 227 pages of the DTs, a funny boohoo ramble through Nighttown, an interior dialogue between Francis and his ghosts. It won a Pulitzer Prize and a healthy audience for the other novels (Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game) in Kennedy's Albany trilogy, with its wry poetic naturalism. The bums in Ironweed were not noble, but they had their own gravelly, poignant voices. The family Francis left behind was ordinary as linoleum, but their emptiness left a sympathetic ache in the reader's gut. Francis was drab and cramped on the outside, that...
...this one. Not even with Hollywood's premier actor-stars, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, as Francis and Helen. And not even with Kennedy writing the screenplay. He must have known that the novel's sour, allusive poetry -- part James Joyce, part James T. Farrell -- would get lost in translation to the screen. He must have realized that Francis' life is significant not for what he does but for what he dreams and fears. But a movie like this, which concentrates on mundane plot, can only show, not reveal. As directed by Hector Babenco (Pixote, Kiss of the Spider Woman...
...finally published in 1953, and that enabled him to put together a collection of his searing essays, Notes of a Native Son ("Each generation is promised more than it will get: which creates, in each generation, a furious, bewildered rage"). Then came Giovanni's Room, a rather purple novel about homosexuality. And then, in 1957, when French friends kept asking him to "explain Little Rock," where the U.S. Army had been summoned to escort nine black children to school through screaming mobs of whites, Jimmy finally decided "that it would be simpler . . . to go to Little Rock than...
...designed to be rejected. Now, as a Republican presidential candidate, he is criticizing the INF treaty as strategically unsound. All three Richards have also moved on. Allen has been succeeded by five National Security Advisers. Perle is presiding over seminars at the American Enterprise Institute and working on a novel about bureaucratic infighting over national-security policy. Burt, who will probably resemble a less than heroic character in Perle's novel, is Ambassador to West Germany...