Word: quartetting
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Updike has certainly never lacked praise or recognition, but his productive career has also prompted a steady drone of cavils: too precious, too self- indulgent, too Waspish, too preoccupied with sex, religion and guilt. If any contradictory argument were needed, Rabbit at Rest provides it. Capping the Rabbit Quartet, this novel completes the most authoritative and most magical portrait yet written of the past four decades of American life...
FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT, by Stephen King (Viking; 763 pages; $22.95), offers a quartet of horror novellas that show this vexing and engaging storyteller at close to his best. What has always charmed and exasperated about King's enormous run of books is a quality not exactly childlike -- James Thurber could be childlike, and so could E.B. White -- but rather teenager-like. The early teens, at that; King is stuck permanently at about 13 1/2. He bops through these stories with the mischievous imagination of a young adolescent, and also the wearying energy, sloppiness, ignorance and complete lack of subtlety...
Distinctive voices are hard to hear this fall amid the din of the assembly line. Much of the new programming is slicker than ever. NBC's The Fanelli Boys, for example, about a quartet of Italian-American brothers who move back to their mother's house in Brooklyn, is cleverly written and brightly acted. But that doesn't compensate for its rancid rehashing of every Italian stereotype known to Hollywood. (One brother is a playboy; another a wheeler- dealer with a hint of Mob connections; a third almost gives Mom a heart attack when he brings home a Jewish girl...
Fleck attended Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, where banjo was not considered a serious instrument. So he studied privately, first with Erik Darling, onetime member of the Weavers folk quartet, and eventually with Trischka, an urban bluegrass whiz. Even then, Fleck was an eclectic, trying to absorb everything from salsa to jazz. Especially jazz. "I bought a Charlie Parker record, and I thought, "Wow! This is incredible." I tried to learn Parker's licks on the banjo, but I couldn't find the notes." One day, in a high school jazz-appreciation class, the teacher played pianist...
Television provided Fleck with the chance to escape what he eventually felt were the Revival's constraints. Two years ago, producers of the Lonesome Pine Specials asked him to do a solo show. Bela Fleck and Guests began with the tux-clad banjoist joining the Blair String Quartet in a four-movement classical work by Fleck and composer Edgar Meyer. It ended with a jazz section riffed by Bela and the trio that became the Flecktones: Howard Levy on keyboards and harmonica, the brothers Victor and Roy ("Future Man") Wooten on bass guitar and Drumitar (a guitar wired to electric...