Word: novels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Joseph Beuys, the late German master of performance art and social spectacles, to video pioneer Vito Acconci to the powerful minimalist sculptor Richard Serra--each of whom dramatically reshaped the artistic landscape. Barney follows, doing what all visionary artists do: he creates a parallel universe that reflects something wholly novel about our own, though through a far narrower lens. His obsession, in his own words, is "to try and find a space that's free; to find that moment between formlessness and form before things get defined...
Hansen deftly conveys these early probings at the border of myth and medicine. The sticky part of the novel is meshing Perlman's conventional musical opinions with his then radical psychology and the hocus-pocus of Sylvie/Nina's deep dive into legendary Atlantis. When the themes are eventually resolved in a kind of hypno-seance, Perlman's conflicted nature is dramatically illustrated. The music lover in the good doctor reacts against unmelodic compositions, while his physician side wants to reduce the lyrics of the subconscious to tuneless abstractions. He appears to have caught an incurable but nonfatal case of modern...
Office drones of the world, unite! This clever first novel is narrated by a nameless young woman who is killing time and brain cells by working as a receptionist at the stuffy Academy of Material Science in London. Pouring her heart out in a novel-cum-diary, she is attempting to figure out a tumultuous love affair. But while this subject has been handled much better by more sophisticated writers, the author really comes alive in her sharp descriptions of the deadly pettiness of office life: who sits with whom in the company cafeteria; what the people who answer...
...Schrank's debut novel, Miracle Man (William Morrow; 290 pages; $13), is a brilliantly observed story about the desire to live in an egalitarian world. The protagonist, Martin Kelly Minter, is a white middle-class son of hippie schoolteachers who finds himself increasingly troubled by the socioeconomic inequality that he sees all around him. He also happens to be a kleptomaniac. Kelly's crusade to redistribute the world's wealth begins when he drops out of Vassar, moves into an illegal sublet in Spanish Harlem and takes a job with the Miracle Moving company, which specializes in relocating rich clients...
...real estate is the star in this updating and betrayal of Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House. Four folks (Catherine Zeta-Jones, Owen Wilson, Lili Taylor, Liam Neeson) are trapped, for no compelling reason, in an old mansion the size of Versailles--not the palace, the city. Doors rattle and children's voices whisper from the dead in this poltergeistian theme-park ride and spooky radio show that never add up to a movie. There's one good shock, with a skeleton in a fireplace; but finally the film collapses in its own special-effects idiocy...