Word: novels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...father's innocence--a case so heartbreakingly sweet that one struggles (though unsuccessfully) to join in the son's self-deception. William F. Buckley Jr., who as a young conservative in the 1950s was a friend to both Chambers and McCarthy, gives his version of McCarthy in a documentary novel, The Redhunter. And in Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr analyze the deciphered '40s cable traffic, recently released, between Soviet agents working in America and their masters in Moscow--files that show there was far more spying, and far more complicity by American party...
...Grant still pretends he is not fully committed to acting. "There's the ever increasing prospect of just...stopping," he says. "It would be such bliss." He dreams of taking up writing again. In his lean years he wrote book reviews and comedy sketches; he even worked on a novel. "It was called Slack," he says, "and it was about someone with no job, strangely enough...
...show off. Like the author's earlier work, this collection is designed to keep readers from getting too comfortable. You know the feeling if you had trouble keeping up with the plot lines, arcana and footnotes that spread like kudzu through the 1,000 pages of Wallace's 1996 novel, Infinite Jest...
...Indian authors Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth by reporting that Rushdie had dismissed Seth's epic 1993 best seller, A Suitable Boy, as nothing but a "soap opera." Seth denied that Rushdie had been snide, but it is a measure of Seth's extraordinary skill and versatility--his first novel, The Golden Gate, was a tale of San Francisco written entirely in elegant verse; A Suitable Boy was the opposite, a marvelous, sprawling, and gripping tale of Indian family life--that one wonders if his latest book, An Equal Music (Broadway Books; 381 pages; $25), is simply his little joke...
Anna Graham, this novel's sardonic narrator, wants nothing more than to be an actress, but is worried that her personality is too overpowering. So she sets about to obliterate it. Her efforts are soon joined by Damon Wetly, a scientist who magnanimously kidnaps Anna, reasoning that by breaking her will, he'll help her become a better actress. Questions on the nature of identity--is it fixed or fungible?--arise throughout Anna's captivity and its aftermath, but the amusingly absurd plot moves too swiftly to address them, opting instead for a tone that is rewardingly escapist...