Word: novels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...know Kurt Andersen. Everyone knows Kurt Andersen (especially here at TIME, where he was on staff for six years). I just know him less well than everybody else does, so it falls to me to review Turn of the Century (Random House; 659 pages; $24.95), his novel about the world in which "everyone" can be defined as the people Kurt Andersen knows...
Worse, you just don't end up with a novel. While he capitalizes handsomely on the freedom afforded by fiction (so many more people you can zing without fear of libel!), Andersen is hamstrung by the overall structure that the genre demands. His sentences may sparkle, but the book's forward motion is a sputtering lope. Its loose, digressive shape makes Turn of the Century awfully easy to put down...
...through him. But it is nonetheless a joy to watch him at work, ricocheting off everything putrid and tinny in our culture. Whatever you call the thing after postmodern, Turn of the Century is it--something post-postmodern, a commentary on commentary. That may not make much of a novel, but it sure is fun to read...
Words won her the Pulitzer for The Shipping News, no question. The novel itself doesn't really track. The main character is gaumless in the first chapters and a functioning human male at the end, simply because the author has decreed a character transplant. But Proulx's language does not admit "yes, but" or "really?" When it works, which is most of the time, it sweeps aside all ideas, her own and the reader's, and allows no response except banging the hands together. Without this mad blaze of confidence, her next novel might have been a hanky dampener. Accordion...
...This novel is not for the squeamish, and it is not a relaxing bedtime read. However, if you are hardened enough to read through the gore and carnage, you will become mesmerized by the ferocious prose. Teran writes without inhibitions and without softening his subject matter, and while his style is harsh, the force behind it will capture even the most reluctant reader...