Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nobody does the cowboy blarney better than Larry McMurtry, elegist of the old Southwest and observer of the new culture in the Sunbelt, where the air conditioner is king. Yet his novels are not nearly as well known as the movies made from them. Horseman, Pass By is more recognizable as Hud. The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment have had far more viewers than readers. Lonesome Dove, McMurtry's tenth novel, is probably stampeding toward the screen at this moment. But first things first...
...karat ventricles, who joins the drive north because she has never lived any place cool. She also motivates much of the action when kidnaped by Blue Duck, an Indian whose specialty is killing settlers and selling their horses and children. Lonesome Dove has the highest mortality rate of any novel in recent memory. Characters are shot, stabbed, hanged, drowned, trampled, struck by snakes and lightning. "Gravediggers could make a fortune in these parts" is the sort of manly banter encountered on every other page. When the guys get dreamy, it is for Lorena or a horse...
...cross section of the English nobility gathers at Sir Randolph Nettleby's estate for a weekend's shoot. The symbolic correlation between the mass destruction of feathered innocents and the slaughter soon to ensue in France seems a little cruder onscreen than it did in Isabel Colegate's subtle novel of manners, as do the human dramas played out around the mansion. But as Sir Randolph, the late James Mason, whose last performance this was, is superb in his distracted eccentricity, especially in a scene with John Gielgud, who plays an animal- rights enthusiast dangerously disrupting the shoot. And there...
This decidedly offbeat first novel offers a mixed message to all those who might be worried about contemporary teenagers. On the one hand, the example of its author looks hopeful: Bret Easton Ellis, 21, is a student at Bennington College and obviously an enterprising and successful young man. But the story he tells about members of his generation is lurid in the extreme. Most readers who are not helplessly zonked on sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll will finish Less Than Zero with the conviction that they have not fretted over the current condition of young people nearly enough...
Ultimately, Ellis' novel is anchored to a hero who stands for nothing. How Clay managed to muster the energy to go to college in the first place remains mysterious; so do the forces that made him so passive and world-weary at age 18. That such questions about the central character seem important is a tribute to Ellis' talent; his refusal to address them is thus all the more unsettling. In spite of its surface vitality and macabre glitter, Less Than Zero offers little more than its title promises...