Word: novels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...kids, as it turns out, may have been less troubled than their dad by what they saw. "This whole sordid mess is just too tawdry and tedious and embarrassing," said Moran on the morning after, his voice a subdued monotone. "It's like a novel that just became too full of juicy parts and bizarre, sleazy characters." Characters like Bill Clinton, the leader of Moran's party, the President he had followed loyally for six years? "I guess part of this is finding out that everyone is far more human than we'd like to believe," conceded the Congressman...
...Elmer Gantry in the flesh and in the heart, and his heart is many chambered. The hero of Sinclair Lewis' great novel about oversize human frailty, made into an even better movie that starred Burt Lancaster and his aggressive teeth, was, like Clinton, a born embracer: "He had a voice made for promises." Discovering his calling as a revivalist preacher, Gantry rose to prominence on the words, "Love is the morning and the evening star." That was his sermon, which did double duty as his seduction line for women. Eventually his wandering eye brought him down; his once adoring congregation...
...also its promiscuity and selfishness. He just about loves everybody, and that leads from temptation to redemption and back again, forever. Sunday night he prayed with Jesse Jackson, from Psalm 51: "Have mercy on me, O God...and cleanse me from my sins." At the end of the novel, Gantry takes note of a new choir girl with pretty ankles, just before he tells the congregation, "We shall yet make these United States a moral nation...
...tied with Zora Neale Hurston for second place in a short-story contest, winning swift admission into the gifted clique of black intellectuals. The daughter of an ex-slave, West settled in tony Martha's Vineyard, Mass., and in 1995, after years of literary silence, published The Wedding, a novel about the black bourgeoisie that she dedicated to her editor, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis...
...front-page story in the Boston Globe. Clapprood is a raspy-voiced bleached blond who jumped from a stint in the state legislature to a gig as one of New England's most famous--and raunchiest--radio personalities. (On the air she once asked Fabio, the romance-novel cover model, if he has "big private parts.") The mayor of Somerville, Michael Capuano, showed strength in a recent poll, but the best hope for an upset may be a wonkish venture capitalist named Chris Gabrieli, who's spending his own millions to run a campaign focused on, of all things, policy...