Word: scene
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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NADYA LABI, in three years at TIME, has written about the schoolyard killings in Jonesboro, Ark., and the crash of Swiss Air Flight 111. In this week's American Scene, she weighs in on a brighter topic: the culture clash in a small city outside Los Angeles, where certain residents paint their homes in vivid yellows and pinks, to the distress of some of their neighbors. While she appreciated the change of topic, the trip wasn't so lighthearted as she anticipated. "I didn't know colors could provoke such strong emotions," she says. Labi, who is moving into...
...seething modern city, if novelists would just leave their desks, maybe take a sabbatical from their professorships in creative writing and go out and report on the fabulous stuff taking place all around them. But, Wolfe complained, most post-'60s U.S. novelists had simply abandoned the passing scene in favor of introspection or self-conscious artifice. They had ceded public reality to journalists, of whom Wolfe was a notable example (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff) before he invaded the House of Fiction and noisily threw open the windows...
...Charlie is hauled into PlannersBanc for a humiliating session known as a "workout." What follows is probably the most riveting fictional scene ever set in a bank conference room, although the competition is admittedly scarce. From his former status as one of PlannersBanc's most-courted customers, Charlie has fallen to the level of "s___head," an arrogant deadbeat who must be bullied out of his profligate habits and set on the course of fiscal prudence. As a grudging sop to the ravenous bankers, Charlie decrees a 15% cut in the work force of another of his enterprises, Croker Global...
...Croker Global warehouse to waiting delivery trucks. Conrad is someone new in a Wolfe novel, a totally good person who wants nothing more out of life than to buy a modest condominium for his family and establish a well-ordered, bourgeois existence. After the most riveting fictional scene ever set in a 0[degree]F freezer unit--here the competition is nonexistent--Conrad learns that he has been laid off, a catastrophe that drives him innocently and mistakenly but also inexorably into the vividly described hellhole of the Alameda County jail...
...intricate interweaving of private and public responsibilities, its electric sense of conveying current events and its knowing portraits of people actually doing their jobs. Who, besides Wolfe, would have thought that banking and real estate transactions could be the stuff of gripping fiction? Who else would have set a scene, the most over-the-top in the whole novel, in the breeding barn at Turpmtine, where Charlie, in a misguided attempt to impress his guests from Atlanta, makes them, male and female alike, witness a tumultuous mating between one of his stallions and a mare? "I attended just such...