Word: osborn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...magazine. He learned of his dismissal only the afternoon before, during a stormy, 2½-hour meeting with Graham and Newsweek President Peter Derow. He was described as shocked, but associates said that he may have missed subtle signals of Graham's displeasure. Under Kosner's predecessor, Osborn Elliott, now dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, Newsweek was briefly known on Madison Avenue as a "hot book" because of improved editorial vitality and attendant advertising and circulation gains. (Newsweek's current U.S. circulation is 2.9 million, vs. TIME's 4.25 million.) Yet newsstand...
YOUNG WESTON recovers. Having lost his lover to an ambitious senior associate and his only friend to academia, he finally gets his feet on the ground by engrossing himself in his work. Professor Osborn improves as well. Presumably more familiar with his subject here, he writes more smoothly about Weston's ascent. Characters become at least humanoid, if never quite lifelike. Camilla Newman, whose most interesting feature is her name, is for most of the book just another pretty face fronting an ambitious, competitive young lawyer. As Weston begins to make it by himself, Camilla develops more personal qualities...
...Osborn's new book displays an unfortunate tendency to unity of form and content. Sam Weston, a fledgling associate at Bass and Marshall, is somewhat at sea in what Osborn portrays as a paranoid, chaotic world of a Wall Street firm. Likewise, Osborn's writing flounders--his conversational tone includes all the usual non-sequiturs, flaws of grammar, and fragmented sentences, and none of the spontaneity. His imagery floats aimlessly is a sea of conventionality, occasionally grasping at some hapless metaphor and squeezing the life from...
...graceful denouement makes The Associates easier to finish, but it doesn't relieve the tedium. Osborn's choppy, five-page chapters seem destined for TV serialization. The all-encompassing theme, that life is like contract law, gives only superficial gloss and structure to a tame love story. When it's all over and done with, Osborn straddles the only issue he raises--is the Wall Street rat race worth it? Weston's friend, Littlefield, drops out only to land gloriously as a Yale Law School professor, and Weston and Newton, although they leave Bass and Marshall, still seem...
...Osborn seems to do nothing more than reuse the ingredients of The Paper Chase for his new novel--a glamorous setting, a love interest, a perceptive but inexperienced protagonist coming up against uncompromising traditions. The Associates reads like a novelization of the bad TV movie which it will undoubtedly become...