Word: novels
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...animal to the extent that it will accept a saddle, bridle and rider. He observes the horse's body language and responds with his own motions to anticipate the animal's fears. Other trainers use versions of the technique. So did the hero of Nicholas Evans' weepy best-selling novel The Horse Whisperer, which later became a Robert Redford film. But though Roberts' book jacket bills him as "a real life horse whisperer," Evans has publicly cited other trainers as the models for his character...
When we keep this in mind, writer Mark O'Donnell emerges as a true gift. A humorist and playwright, O'Donnell has mastered the art of conveying the bittersweet. In his first novel, Getting Over Homer, O'Donnell wryly traced a twin's failing quest to find a bond similar to the one he shared with his sibling. In his second novel, Let Nothing You Dismay (Knopf; 193 pages; $22), O'Donnell is once again obsessed with a young man's search for wholeness, and here too the author's witticisms flow felicitously...
...movie, adapted from his own novel by Scott B. Smith and directed by Sam Raimi, whose specialty is cultish horror films, has an addled, feckless sobriety about it. These people think they're saying something serious about greed and how it can cloud people's judgment. They want you to think Fargo or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. But there's neither intricacy nor surprise in the narrative, and these dopes are tedious, witless company. Mostly you find yourself thinking, "How long until dinner...
Sullivan's latest novel, Love Undetectable, is born from this revolution in AIDS treatment. Sullivan tells us of his renaissance--his tacit preparation for death, then his difficult readjustment to life. Sullivan makes it clear that along with the euphoria that followed the realization that he was going to live came a surprising anticlimax. It seemed that life was most precious when it was about to end. As his viral load of AIDS plummeted, Sullivan's relief was countered by an unexpected banality. And so, Love Undetectable is divided into three essays that explore the spectrum of thoughts that germinated...
Mark O'Donnell's new novel, Let Nothing You Dismay, recounts a day in the life of Tad Leary, a 34-year-old New Yorker poised to do battle with a day of Christmas parties that force him to con-front every group of significant people in his life. On Christmas Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve (Tad and his brother's childhood way of marking the days till Christmas), Tad has just been fired from his job at an elementary school and is about to be booted out of his apartment. He navigates his way through family, a friend...