Word: protagonists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Back in the World is refreshing for its variety. "Soldier's Joy" is a venture into despair that we almost don't escape. "The Missing Person," on the other hand, has a protagonist who is almost as strange and lost and cynical as his counterpart in "Soldier's Joy." He is a priest whom life has clubbed with one disgrace after another, but who begins a quiet, enduring love affair with a woman he meets by chance at a hotel...
...irreverent reverend stepped way out of line with those remarks. When his more recent questioner stopped reading her typed text, he admitted as much--kind of. He explained that public speakers like to have their fun. Alluding to this new protagonist's close-cropped hair, masculine attire and strident manner, Falwell said he would probably describe her in similar terms...
...another person just won't do . . . I believe . . . that there's better days ahead/ I believe . . . there's a heaven before I'm dead." Kempner trucks fresh force and vigor to the antiwar genre in Soldier's Home, then brings the war home in Against My Will, whose protagonist is an American hostage. The situation is familiar ("I'm sitting in a foreign country/ In an army barracks hidden in the hills/ I've been here for nearly seven months now"), but the sentiments are not likely to get the Del-Lords invited to a lawn party at the White...
Archer's hero is Adam Scott, a former British army captain who goes on the run and has trouble crossing borders. The pages turn amusingly, and secret agents from several nations chase the protagonist with vigor and invention. But all this hare-and-hounding is the result of a mixup, and one suspects quite early on that when that nice Captain Scott is given a hearing, it will be the agents who are in trouble...
...Smile in His Lifetime, Gravedigger) offers an alternative to the macho, down-at-the-heels stereotype. He is David Brandstetter, a Southern California insurance investigator who is affluent, well dressed and homosexual. This subgenre is bicoastal; see George Baxt's novels, beginning with A Queer Kind of Death. The protagonist is a gay New York City police detective named Pharaoh Love. Other successful challenges to the bruiser class are Sara Paretsky's Chicago sleuth, Ms. V.I. Warshawski (Deadlock), and George C. Chesbro's Robert Frederickson, a dwarf with a doctorate in criminology and a black belt in karate...