Word: novelled
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dates and forgot a name. At one point, a pitcher of ice water in his hand, he poised haltingly over his coffee cup as his face betrayed mounting confusion over the disappearance of his water glass, which he had earlier placed behind him. "It's just like an airport novel," muses a city official. "It's like the poor country boy who fights his way to the top and then becomes everything he's been fighting against." Like the emperor, Barry blindly marches...
...good career move. As Eliot Ness in The Untouchables, he played the straightest arrow in Prohibition-era Chicago and made saintliness sexy. As Tom Farrell, the cryptic intelligence officer in 1987's No Way Out, he brought devious modernity to a character right out of a '40s suspense novel. As Crash Davis, the bush-league catcher in 1988's Bull Durham, he found charm in cynicism and anchored the first hit baseball movie in a dozen years. And as Ray Kinsella in the current Field of Dreams -- the Iowa farmer who hears spectral pleas of pain, builds a ball park...
...adolescence followed by the ritual college degree. But with no draft to face -- no obligations at all, really -- how is a bright, sensitive, well-off young fellow to grow up? Honoring tradition, Alec Stern decides to go abroad to try out maturity. His destination: Tokyo. Bicycle Days, a first novel by a 24-year-old Harvard graduate, is the wry, rueful story of Alec's efforts to cope with his job at a computer outfit and with a vexing foreign culture. Through his adoptive family, the friendship of an old fisherman and a troubling affair with an older woman...
...Japanese word ukiyo -- "the floating world" -- suggests the narrow bridges of Hiroshige or the frozen waves of Hokusai. In Kadohata's novel of the '60s, a Japanese American redefines ukiyo as the Western U.S., a place of "gas station attendants, restaurants, and jobs we depended on, the motel towns floating in the middle of fields and mountains." Kadohata has a painter's eye, and her narrator's scroll is filled with scrupulously detailed portraits -- of her tyrannical grandmother, of herself and her lovers and, memorably, of unassimilated migrant workers, like "animals migrating across a field . . . moving from the hard life...
...drug addict in a local mental hospital. Through him Zoe reawakens from the arid existence of the once loved; recapturing a tender moment they shared as children brings redemption. She learns that "love isn't something you wait for. It's something you do." The novel has echoes of faddish self-help themes, but by interweaving the stories and dreams of three willful women, Morris offers a comforting truth about families. We build our memories inside the memories of others, and what they remember can take root in us as well...