Word: novels
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...Marine Corps summer reviews are the best patriotic pageants in the country. The aides to powerful public figures take the place of the wives of these workaholics. "After all," says McLellan, "they see their aides more often, and the aides are more obedient than the wives." Now for her novel. It's hard to see, though, how fiction can top true life...
HOSPITALIZED. Françoise Sagan, 50, French novelist and playwright whose shocking first novel about youthful nihilism and passionless hedonism, Bonjour Tristesse (1954), published when she was 18, became an international best seller; in Paris. While on a visit to 8,500-ft.-high Bogotá, Colombia, she collapsed with pulmonary edema and cardiac weakness brought on by the altitude; she was flown home to France and remains under sedation in improving condition...
...comparison, World's Fair is downright guarded. Doctorow calls it a novel. But the book reads like a memoir, and is unmistakably based on the author's early boyhood in the Bronx. The account begins with a bed wetting in the middle of the Depression and ends on the eve of World War II with a nine-year-old Edgar Altschuler burying a cardboard time capsule containing a Tom Mix decoder badge, his school report on the life of F.D.R., a harmonica and a pair of Tootsy Toy lead rocket ships, "to show I had foreseen the future...
...curious defensiveness to his enterprise. Tone seems to have been substituted for emotion; artiness replaces vitality. Doctorow aims for a myth that would link a nation on the edge of war and a boy approaching adolescence, but he is too cautious with his material. He calls the book a novel, yet it has few of the elements usually associated with the form. A melancholy Edgar ticks off his experiences and observations; his mother, brother and aunt make brief personal appearances, while the father remains silent and remote. Even the Bronx is incompletely perceived. Granted that it is not New York...
...Smith has reason to fear. Her new novel follows such a bell ringer, a haunting and resonant story of Appalachia called Oral History (1983). Family Linen uses the same narrative technique: members of a troubled clan are revealed directly to the reader, one by one, in contrasting chapters...