Word: novelled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Readers can be persuaded to care, however, if the memoirist is Reynolds Price (The Source of Light, Kate Vaiden), one of a few writers whose full- length fictions do honor to the term regional novel. Price's region is central North Carolina, where he has lived for most of his 56 years. His father Will was a traveling salesman who fought a lifelong battle against alcohol and financial insecurity. His mother Elizabeth was one of the genteel metal magnolias who, despite generosity to their black servants, Price notes, were the "chief conveyors" of the racist code that cursed...
...most eagerly anticipated arrival, Lloyd Webber's Aspects of Love, is also the best. Adapted from a 1955 novel by Britain's David Garnett, it is a rueful and autumnal meditation on romance as a process of teaching, almost of parenting. Five characters of widely varying ages entwine, sort themselves out and entwine in new pairings over decades. This sophisticated material is handled with cunning naivete. Lloyd Webber's score, characteristically, consists mostly of a few much repeated tunes: Love Changes Everything, Seeing Is Believing and Life Goes On, Love Goes Free. All three rank among the prettiest...
Having enlisted the audience's sympathies, and its knowing nods that the first playlet shows what life is really like, Sherman reveals in the second half that Table is not reality but invention -- the plot, in fact, of a famous '60s novel that a Hollywood producer proposes to contort into an MTV- influenced musical. Sherman's sprawling, ambitious piece has any number of themes, most powerfully the idea that art comforts us by letting us focus on microcosmic disasters so that we can ignore the global ones. Dominating an exceptional cast are Rupert Graves as the young artist...
Readers of book reviews (or at least the best-seller lists) know by now that the most popular novel of the moment is John le Carre's new -- and some say best -- spy thriller The Russia House, whose typically complex plot deals with the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race. A subject like that, of course, requires accuracy and special attention to detail. How does Le Carre get his information about so arcane a field? Readers of the author's acknowledgments in The Russia House know the answer: Le Carre relied on a first-class expert, Strobe Talbott, TIME's Washington...
...example, when he needed insights on Hong Kong for his 1977 novel The Honourable Schoolboy, Le Carre devoted days to conversations with TIME Hong Kong correspondent Bing Wong. For The Little Drummer Girl (1983), set partially in the Middle East, Le Carre got useful background from Abu Said Abu Rish, a Palestinian journalist who at the time was office manager of TIME's Beirut bureau. Le Carre still treasures an unusual gift that Abu Said gave him -- a sword that once belonged to the Palestinian's father. "Have you ever tried to take a sword through security in the Middle...