Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Elizabeth Strout tests the strength of that umbilical bond in her first novel, Amy and Isabelle (Random House; 304 pages; $22.95). In the small New England town of Shirley Falls, Isabelle Goodrow is a single mother with a shameful secret: her daughter Amy, 16, is illegitimate. As if in atonement for her youthful fling, Isabelle is now, in her early 30s, the image of propriety, maintaining perfect posture and an immaculate French twist. She craves respectability but is too poor for the upper echelon of Shirley Falls and too proud to befriend her co-workers at the mill. Amy shares...
...ANATOLI RYBAKOV, 87, Russian author; in New York City. Rybakov started writing stories part time while driving a truck. His children's book The Dirk, published in 1950, was an immediate success and admired by Stalin. On the other hand, it took years for him to get his epic novel Children of the Arbat published. When the work--which freely discusses Stalin's terrors--finally appeared in 1986, it sold more than 1 million copies in the Soviet Union...
This is funny enough but gets tired easily. Celebrity by itself teeters so often into self-parody that it seems too easy to bash it. Fortunately, Ellis does more than that, injecting Glamorama with a sharper plot than those of earlier novels, a plot which kicks in about a quarter of the way into the novel. Victor, for a $300,000 fee, is sent by the mysterious F. Fred Palakon (whose name echoes G. Gordon Liddy's neatly enough to hint at the web of deceit to follow) to London to look for a former Camden College friend, Jamie Fields...
...public spheres of politics and religion to the private sphere of sex--is part of this world. The plot twists more often than Chubby Checker on speed. Reality alternates with the constructed so often that the constructed becomes real: "everything is altered... everyone will believe this". Even the novel itself borrows Jay McInerney's Alison Poole character (from McInerney's Story of My Life...
...slide down the surface of things" runs the constant refrain of the novel, and while Glamorama's 482 pages of vacuous characters provoke a desire to surface, to break out of the trap of celebrity, it also points out the pervasive nature of glamor. Ellis is often more interested in being cool than actual meaning (the novel opens with a Hitler quote); with Glamorama, he seems to be saying that this is the only truth we all share