Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Author Padgett Powell, 35, has weathered this ordeal nicely. To be sure, a few readers will complain that his second novel fails to live up to the promise of Edisto, which drew raves and comparisons to Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye when it appeared in 1984. A Woman Named Drown is not going to remind anyone of Anna Karenina. On the other hand, Powell's new book picks up smoothly where its predecessor left off, which is not, given the level of skills evident throughout Edisto, a bad place to begin...
Chris Starkmann went to Viet Nam as innocent as the narrator of Platoon. In this powerful novel, the veteran bitterly recalls the death wish of Ulysses: "Would God I, too, had died there . . . I should have had a soldier's burial and praise." Instead, the madness acquired 14 years earlier has been carried home, slowly eroding his marriage, his job and his life. A soldier is most vulnerable when he feels safest, he drunkenly repeats, and in the rough country of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where people have "no possibilities, no place to go," Chris comes to believe...
...voters. But all such plans died with the news of the Washington Post's potential bombshell. Hart conceded the inevitable when he told Bill Shore early Thursday morning, "Let's go home." On the charter flight back to Denver, Hart sat by himself and read the Tolstoy novel Resurrection. Perhaps the intense spiritual faith of Tolstoy's later years provided comfort. Perhaps Hart wanted to remind himself that he still had a life outside politics. But there would be no resurrections for Hart's political career, at least not in 1988. Hart was a candidate who dared to be different...
...proprietor of the London Daily Beast, saw the hierarchy of the press in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. A half-century later, Charles Simmons may have trouble getting past the lowliest editorial assistant at the New York Times Book Review, where he spent 33 years as an editor. His latest novel, which caused a few clucks when it was excerpted pseudonymously in the Nation and the New Republic, is a farce about office politics at a Manhattan literary magazine...
Frank Page is the upstanding young editor who narrates the novel, an account of the workings of Belles Lettres from its beginnings as the plaything of the rich and cultivated Winifred Buckram to its present as a property of Protean Publications, whose owner, Cyrus Tooling, is less cultivated. His response to the journal's list of 25 important American writers: "Who the f is Harold Brodkey? And where the f is Herman Wouk...