Word: novelizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...mixed formula of voluntary and negotiated debt reduction between the banks and debtor nations. Last September Brazil signed a package worth $82.1 billion that includes an $8.3 billion net reduction in debt in 1988 and 1989, and $5.2 billion in new money. Venezuelan economic officials are considering a novel way to raise $1 billion that would make future oil sales a guarantee against new credits...
Joyce Carol Oates, 50, has done nothing of the sort. For the past two decades she has produced roughly a novel a year, plus numerous collections of short stories, criticism and essays. She has written plays and even, two years ago, a nonfiction work on boxing. This frenetic production has hardly destroyed her reputation; she is a literary figure of considerable clout, she holds a tenured professorship at Princeton University, and every fall her name is rumored to be on the short list for the Nobel Prize. But there is something of the sideshow about her renown among the general...
Perhaps American Appetites, her 19th novel, will be taken for granted, like some of its predecessors, as just another entry in a burgeoning bibliography. That reaction would be a sad mistake. Oates is here working at the very top of her form, her idiosyncratic virtues eerily in phase with the temperamental excesses for which she has so often been rebuked. Those who want to know what makes her important -- as opposed to merely famous -- could find no better place to begin than right here...
...American Appetites offers a thoroughly credible version of what is both unbelievable and disturbingly familiar. Her prose is headlong. There are cliches; sentences do not ask to be examined for artful felicities. Pausing seems beside the point. The rush is utterly convincing. Any definition of art that excludes this novel is probably too narrow...
...more probable reason for fictitious identifications is to prevent libel suits. Because the impact of true crime depends on melodrama, the scenes and dialogue are liberally re-created by the author. Some of the dialogue seems too good to be true -- unless it appeared in a George Higgins novel. To readers this may seem like New Journalism, but to publishing-house lawyers it is safe storytelling. Blind Faith belongs to a subliterary genre designed for a litigious age. Unfortunately, these are the measures that are taken to ensure that true crime pays for the author, not his subjects...