Word: oilman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Joyce, Proust and Kafka had made the old-fashioned novel redundant, a tired illusion that had been exposed once and for all as a sham. Literature should no longer pretend to portray people doing things: it ought to be an artful arrangement of words on a page. Critic Richard Oilman, typically, called narrative "that element of fiction which coerces and degrades it into being a mere alternative to life." Updike's novels and stories went right on, stubbornly offering swatches of alternative lives. Their author proved over the years that the ramshackle, theoretically condemned house of story telling still...
...major beneficiary. Yale-educated Michael Thomas, who at 46 has had successful careers in both milieus (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lehman Brothers), has distilled from the darker lunacies of these worlds a novel of crackling humor and mordant observation. Its bigger-than-Barron 's protagonist is Oilman Buford ("Bubber") Gudge IV, who has been content to nurse his multibillion-dollar fortune in the Texas Panhandle until lust and vengeance propel him forth like a plague of pissants...
...tense back home. His cantankerous grandfather goes on living and seething beyond his time; a sister with "insufficient resistance to pain of every kind" opts for the lesser agony of suicide. The lonesome cowboy finds purpose only in pursuing Claire, the icy wife of a "vivid . . . piercey-bright, oilman feisty" pseudo-patrón named Tio. The result is McGuane's standard mano á mano struggle in which the prize is less significant than the battle itself...
...Oilman said that in his cause there had been pressure from the state legislature and then-acting governor to prevent his appointment...
...Oilman charged that the decision was made because he was a Marxist, He will soon be appealing the outcome of a suit he lost this past summer against Toll...