Word: novels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Early in 1924 in Paris, Harold Loeb was the proud possessor of: 1) a little magazine with big pages called Broom; 2) a mistress; 3) the manuscript of a novel, soon to be accepted with the publisher's proviso that Loeb put back all the "a's" and "the's" he had deliberately left out; and 4) the friendship of a fledgling expatriate writer, amateur boxer and soso tennis player named Ernest Hemingway, who dubbed Loeb "one of the better guys of all time." By the end of the fiesta at Pamplona, Spain in the summer...
Enter Brett Ashley. Chances are that Harold Loeb would never have been a character in a Hemingway novel if Duff Twitchell had not riveted his eye in the mirror of the Select Cafe in Paris and said, in her low, exciting voice, "It is the only miracle"-meaning love. Duff took love and drink in immoderation. Depending on the flow of checks from England, she and her upper-Bohemian lover, Pat Swazey, lived on champagne or birdseed. Duff called strangers "darling" and friends "good chaps," had a title by marriage, and as anyone may guess, was the model for Hemingway...
TEMPO DI ROMA, by Alexis Carvers (328 pp.; McGraw-Hill; $4.50), is evidence that nothing makes more pleasant reading than a novel that is both light and serious-unless it is a love letter written with tact. Alexis Curvers' light and serious novel is a moving love letter to the city of Rome. It consists of the memoirs of Jimmy, an exquisitely cultivated Belgian bum who gets a job as a tourist guide in the Holy City and finds a few shadowy, crackpot friends. There is Sir Craven, so named for his Craven "A" cigarettes, a fop straight...
...subdues a reader more thoroughly than a cowcatcher of another author's prose or poetry, bolted to the front of a book or chapter. And no novelist now working is better equipped to conduct a seminar on the technique than Niven (Duel in the Sun) Busch. His current novel, about a moneyed San Francisco clan, has ten epigraphs-one at the beginning of each chapter. A Latin proverb assures doubters that the author is classically educated, a quotation from the San Francisco Examiner implies that his feet are solidly on the ground, a scrap from T. S. Eliot warns...
...child's illegitimacy with Ring Lardner's grand old gag about the bumpkin who remarks, on learning that his friend was born out of wedlock, "That's mighty pretty country around there." Lardner's act is hard to follow, and by comparison, Busch's novel is as solemn as a convocation of bishops. Its most egregious epigraphy comes before the climactic scene. The book's central figure, a bombastic newspaper publisher who is given to raging soliloquies, is cruelly beset in his old age by two ungrateful daughters, who try to seize the paper...