Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Stardom gets to people. Seeing themselves bigger than life onscreen, actors figure their characters' next step is toward deity. So Sly Stallone rewrites history and wins the Viet Nam War in retrospect. Robert Redford turns the gifted loser of Bernard Malamud's novel The Natural into a legend inscribed in fireworks. As for Clint Eastwood, cited in a recent Roper poll as the nation's No. 1 hero, impersonating mere humans is no longer a challenge. So in Pale Rider, Hollywood's first big-time, straight-faced western since Heaven's Gate, Eastwood plays God, or maybe Death. With...
...debut in Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer (1979); the hero was an earnest young author in the process of learning that art and life issued contradictory demands. By the time of Zuckerman Unbound (1981), Nathan had become absurdly rich and famous, thanks to a scandalous best-selling novel that estranged him from his father and the rest of his family. Zuckerman's punishment came in The Anatomy Lesson (1983), in which he appeared as a neurasthenic wreck hoping to start life all over again as a medical student...
About a fifth of the way into his 13th and best mystery novel, Robert B. Parker explicitly acknowledges what he is up to: he seeks to re-create, in contemporary context, the medieval quest. In A Catskill Eagle, his hard-boiled detective, Spenser, vows to rescue a maiden imprisoned in a tower. But the modern world, with its complexities ranging from feminism to the military- industrial complex, has all but nullified the chance for such straightforward valor. The "maiden" is Spenser's estranged girlfriend, Susan Silverman; her supposed captor is Spenser's rival for her love; her disappearance...
Anyone who announces the arrival of another book by Stephen King should speak quickly and get out of the way. King's loyal and extensive readership will stampede toward the author's work, even when, as is the case with the recent best-selling novel Thinner, it is offered under a pseudonym. Nothing whatever in Skeleton Crew, a collection of 22 stories written over the past 19 years, will disappoint his presold constituents...
...Beattie's third novel is set in Vermont, which seems to most of her characters only a short ego trip away from Manhattan and Los Angeles. The new publisher of Country Daze, a Perrier-and-lime sort of publication, remarks: "I discriminate enough to know who means most to me. I mean most to me." So, apparently, does everyone else. Lucy Spenser, who writes a Miss Lonelyhearts column for the magazine under the pen name Cindi Coeur, is having a sporadic affair with her editor Hildon and trying to figure out why her old friend Les dumped her. Lucy...