Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...White and Blue is an excellent example of Randall Jarrell's definition of the novel as a long narrative that has something wrong with it. Tightly made in its parts, the book sags as a whole. Dunne, a journalist and, with Wife Joan Didion, writer of such filmscripts as A Star Is Born and True Confessions, seems to have put his notebooks, filing cabinet and even his sock drawer to good use. His descriptions of courtrooms and Hollywood living rooms suggest nimble legwork and a fine ear. Agent to agent: "You can say what you want about communism, but those...
With the exception of death, nothing seems likely to interrupt the boozy monotony of such played-out lives. Amis does, as it happens, kill off one of his major characters, with no warning at all. But this end is not a climax. The novel's conclusion echoes with small regenerations, salvages hoarded against the arrival of the inevitable. The comfort is cold but no less welcome for that. The Old Devils is not quite Amis' funniest book; it is his wisest and most humane...
American admirers of Kingsley Amis, 64, were cheered last October to learn that The Old Devils, his 18th novel, had won the Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award. "About time" seemed a fitting response to the news, especially from those readers who had discovered the writer's incendiary comic skills as far back as his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954). On the other hand, the thought of Amis' being toasted across Britain was enough to provoke an unsettling question among Stateside fans: Could it be possible that the aging bad boy wrote a book that did not insult...
...novel, it turns out, manifests little of the female bashing that made the satiric Stanley and the Women (1985) so scandalous. In fact, dissatisfied wives are given some tart remarks to make about their variously unsatisfactory husbands. And if Amis continues to put liberal ideas through scorching ridicule, he also allows one of his men an expression of sympathy for Britain's unemployed, albeit loutish, youth. Even so, these concessions never denature Amis' characteristic bite; instead they suggest a new pathos behind the comic facade...
...result of a novel cross-promotion deal in which no money will change hands between Pepsi and Paramount, the film's producer. To compensate the studio for putting the ad on the cassette, almost $2 million worth of the jet-jockey Diet Pepsi commercials on broadcast TV will carry a voice-over touting the Top Gun video. Because Paramount will get free advertising, it will charge only $26.95 for the cassette, about $3 less than the lowest price so far for a major release...