Word: novelled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Billed as a "guide to the books everyone talks about and some people even read," Spy Notes satirizes hip, urban novels. A chapter synopsis of a Tama Janowitz novel: "Eleanor goes to Wilfredo's apartment for a dinner party. The couples are all men. The reader understands that Wilfredo is homosexual. Eleanor does not. This is called dramatic irony...
...English movies of the '80s had a team like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, David Lodge's funny, adroit Nice Work would make an ideal vehicle for them. The novel's protagonist, Vic Wilcox, is a gruff but keen-witted exec struggling to turn around a laggard steel-parts factory in Rummidge -- "an imaginary city," the author informs us, "which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world." Vic's antagonist (and here the term is literal) is Robyn Penrose, an attractive, rigorously feminist lecturer...
...either sphere his writing displays the wicked eye of a born satirist. Swallow's smile exposes teeth set at odd angles, "like tombstones in a neglected churchyard." A receptionist at Vic's factory strokes her platinum-blond hairdo "as if it were an ailing pet." This is a novel that lives up to its own billing: it's nice work...
POLAR STAR by Martin Cruz Smith (Random House; $19.95). In a sequel to his best-selling detective novel Gorky Park, Smith sets Moscow investigator Arkady Renko off on another bizarre case. The setting this time is a fishing boat on the Bering Sea; one dead body leads to others along an arc of increasing menace and violence...
...woman share secrets, make each other laugh and squirm. What a novel idea for a movie! Two funny, poignant movies: sex, lies, and videotape and When Harry Met Sally...