Word: proust
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nicholson Baker is a subatomic physicist of fiction, a quantum suburban Proust. He is a wizard at anatomizing the micromechanics of mental life, at charting the quicksilver zigzags of decision and indecision, a writer who can spin out a mock epic from a pair of broken shoelaces...
...Brodkey legend took wing after his debut, First Love and Other Sorrows, was published in 1958. Several critics dubbed him the American Proust. Susan Sontag chimed in: the author was "going for real stakes." Yale professor Harold Bloom burbled, "If he's ever able to solve his publishing problems, he'll be seen as one of the great writers...
This is embarrassing to admit, but this review is a little late. I was supposed to assess all of this year's baseball books, weighty tomes like Mickey Mantle's most recent epic, a reminiscence in the manner of Marcel Proust, My Favorite Summer 1956. But dazzled as I was by his emotionally evocative sentences ("I met up with Billy at the St. Moritz coffee shop for a quick cup of coffee"), I confess that I yielded to temptation. Instead of scrupulously working my way through a pile of new books as oversized as Cecil Fielder's strike zone...
Trivia: Enjoys reading Proust in the evenings...
...eerie feeling of dipping into a version of Proust's Swann's Way written from the point of view of the object of Swann's fixation. Farrell in no way resembles the fictional Odette, but she tries to distance herself from suffocating attention, tries to limit passion to the stage and embrace practicality off it. Balanchine's attentions were consuming. He designed little furs for her and bought her shoes because "I just love to hear you clip-clopping along." After she broke the spell, she danced old roles and new ones, finally watching Mr. B.'s slow decline...