Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This first novel by a previously unknown author has managed to climb quickly onto best-seller lists. Such a feat is infrequent enough to prompt the question why. True, The Good Mother garnered some enthusiastic reviews, and the publisher, evidently sensing a winner, launched a barrage of advertising and publicity. But if this sort of support automatically spelled success, the nation would be crawling with best sellers. Genuine word-of-mouth, pass-along reader enthusiasm cannot be sustained by ads alone. Books that seemingly come out of nowhere to capture wide audiences do so primarily because they offer exactly what...
...novel's hero, of a sort, turns out to be Benton Lynch, nephew of the bald Jeeter, son of the fat Jeeter, and a lad who "could not ever rise much above cipherdom." The author, of course, elaborates: "He was not blatantly stupid or outright idiotic. There was not anything blatant or outright about him, not anything at all. He mostly simply was not." What Benton does possess, it turns out, is a taste for armed robbery and a lecherous hankering after Jane Elizabeth Firesheets, who is willing to overlook his myriad inadequacies for the thrill of sharing a life...
...intentional excesses, Pearson's style can be genuinely funny: "Lemly had no industry whatsoever and little agriculture to speak of unless mildew counted for something." But the discovery and enjoyment of such moments call for considerable patience. When the author's first novel, A Short History of a Small Place, appeared last year, reviewers guessed at such august influences as Twain and Faulkner. This time out, a case might be made for episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies. Pearson's parody of high-flown, old- fashioned Southern yarn spinning sounds a little too much like the minister presiding at the funeral...
Taking a larger role in such crises will be a novel experience for both Conable and the World Bank. The bank was founded in 1945 as the chief conduit for aid to war-torn Europe and Japan. It was viewed as a source of 15- to 20- year development loans, while the International Monetary Fund was created simultaneously to provide short-term lending to countries suffering from balance of payments problems. Since World War II, though, the World Bank has * evolved from a long-term lender for Third World public works to a technocratic antipoverty institution with some...
Publishers have adopted a variety of novel techniques to help stem the flood of telephone traffic. Borland International runs a forum on the CompuServe network where customers' questions are answered by either the company's technicians or other CompuServe subscribers. Lotus and Microsoft fill their disks with elaborate help messages that can be called up to the screen the moment a problem arises. Software Publishing, creator of the easy- to-use PFS filing and word-processing programs, refers callers back to their dealers...