Word: novels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...title novella in McInerney's new book, Model Behavior (Knopf; 275 pages; $24), does make some good jokes about our increasing desire to kowtow to celebrities. Having interviewed a slew of them for magazines, and having been interviewed almost as much himself since his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, was published in 1984, McInerney knows how generic the whole experience is. The main character in Model Behavior just hits a button on his keypad to produce a paragraph about an actor living in Montana (CTRL, Mont) or a starlet claiming she still thinks of herself as ugly (SHIFT, What...
...Psycho and a longtime McInerney buddy, doesn't seem too worried about the feelings of models either. His next book, Glamorama, due out this winter, is a screed against models and celebrity. McInerney says the passages he has read are dark, something he avoided. "I deliberately wrote a comic novel because you don't go chasing butterflies with sledgehammers," he says...
Love triangles are a dime a dozen in novels, but hate triangles are altogether rarer. In John Burnham Schwartz's swift, smooth second novel, Reservation Road (Knopf; 292 pages; $24), the three-sided relationship between Ethan Learner, a pacifist English professor; his wife Grace, a trusting garden designer; and Dwight Arno, a temperamental probate lawyer, converges on a common point of pain: the hit-and-run death of 10-year-old Josh Learner, Ethan and Grace's music-prodigy son, at the cold steel hands of Dwight's Ford Taurus. The death is an accident, all blood and vectors...
Part hardboiled thriller, part sensitive melodrama, with tears for the ladies and gunplay for the guys, the novel borrows a potent narrative trick from Kenneth Fearing's noir classic, The Big Clock: Schwartz tells the story from complementary viewpoints that must sooner or later collide and clash. In their grief and remorse, the three lead characters start out locked in separate universes. Ethan, insulated in his study, ceaselessly revisits happier days while simultaneously dreaming of revenge, despite a father who drilled him in nonviolence. Grace drifts in an existential darkness amid her bright perennials, her spirit crisping and withering leaf...
...True Thing, a patient, unforced adaptation of Anna Quindlen's novel by screenwriter Karen Croner and director Carl Franklin, contains lots of true things about that process. For it immerses us in the awful, vertiginous panic that attends a death in the family--the fierce-wistful attempts to maintain routines in the face of this most exigent of interruptions; the desire to speak certain truths before it's too late and the fear of what consequences such candor might have; the politesse with which you must cover the outrage you feel as the rest of the world glides on about...