Word: novels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Titanic character. There she grasped heedlessly at her destiny; here her reach is more tentative, her manner more reactive than active. There's bravery in that acting choice, and in the refusal of director Gillies MacKinnon, working from a script adapted by his brother Billy of a novel by Esther Freud, either to romanticize or trash the hippie past. They permit us to see it for what it was--another silly, doomed, very human attempt to evade responsibility's inescapable embrace...
...place on television, and soon Barnes and Noble will need to create extra room for her, perhaps with a books-about-thirtyish-media- women-who-fret-and-drink-Scotch-in-New-York-or-California section. In the year since Helen Fielding's best-selling Bridget Jones's Diary, a novel focused on a cocktails-and-cellulite-obsessed London editor, writers have continued to weigh in on how single women do, and should, comport themselves...
...only in the form of melted ice in my drinks." A ghostwriter for a Jackie Collins-ish author, Claudia is trying to exit her protracted adolescence and win the love of her best friend, a lawyer, William, who might want to keep things platonic. Not much happens in this novel (and some of what does happens a bit too randomly), but Claudia is endearing because she remains appreciative of her own grittiness. She avoids coming off as Bridget can: like an unfunny stand-up comic bemoaning the fact that she doesn't look like Elizabeth Hurley...
True feminist points, though, might go to Otherwise Engaged, which, while no paragon of craftsmanship, takes on the subject of female commitment fear, not a topic feverishly discussed in McCall's. The novel deconstructs a year in the life of Eve, a successful ad executive, as she prepares to marry at 36. She has dated her beau for four years. All along she has thought happiness would come in a ring box, but once Eve gets her gem, all she can do is panic over the foreverness of it all--aren't all married people miserable? It is comforting...
...perhapsbe easily forgotten today, what is implied byHemingway's subtlety is a set of social andhumanistic concerns of real depth and emotivepower. Malcolm Cowley considers Hemingway'sgreatest achievement to be not the short stories,or A Farewell to Arms, but For Whom the BellTolls, the novel that at the Hemingway CentennialConference was looked down upon as a failed ifambitious attempt at broad social criticism, ananomaly in Hemingway. But maybe Cowley,Hemingway's contemporary, understood somethingimportant about Hemingway's social concerns that,by and large, escaped the writer/critics at theCentennial...