Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Washington lawyer who hates himself for the compromises made on the climb upward. Edgar Lannin is a cynical Boston-based newsman whose life revolves around alimony payments and self-inflicted assaults on his liver. Friends since their college days at Fordham, the conflicted personnel of George Higgins' newest novel do not really go any place between the book's first page and its last. But the two, who consume enough alcohol to drown W.C. Fields, manage to talk a good life. Their conversations, about sex and the lack of it, marriage, divorce and children, and Roman Catholic angst...
Edwin Newman's comic novel about a skinny English prizefighter who spouts economic theory when struck is what used to be called folderol. As folderol goes, it is on the airy side, and even for airy folderol, it lacks substance. A prospective reader should be warned that the author, perhaps driven to dementia by his efforts to persuade Americans to speak English (in Strictly Speaking and A Civil Tongue), retails a joke about an Oriental fighter named Kid Pro Kuo, "who gave as good as he got." And that one of the characters, a fight manager named Fogbound Franklin...
Remember The Group - Mary McCarthy's novel about eight college girls and how they grew? Change Vassar to Radcliffe, the '30s to the '50s, take away the wry tone, and you have Rona Jaffe's readable reworking, Class Reunion. The four women in her sorority are archetypes...
...balding lover Henry, whom Billy catches poring over nymphet glossies in a porn shop. Epstein is at his best with fresh comic perceptions of growing up absurd in a multiparent home. He is at his weakest in describing Billy's moony infatuation with Zizi, which leads to the novel's adolescent denouement...
...house of literature is in its usual state of disrepair. Poetry is depressed, the novel remains in the shadow of James, Joyce and Proust, and an aging Tennessee Williams is still the greatest living playwright. But wait: there is a light burning in the attic window. Biography is alive, well, and scribbling away, better than ever. The banners may not be waving in college English departments and the critics may not be cheering quite as much as they should, but we are now in a golden age of biography. Indeed, all but half a dozen of the greatest biographies...