Word: turnings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...step in America, the country that invented the drive-through and the TV dinner, but already in the U.S. there are 1,500 members dispersed into 21 chapters, or what Slow Food poetically calls convivia, derived from the Latin word meaning festive. Lately many convivia have been forced to turn away people lest the groups risk losing their intimacy. Petrini sees promise in such American phenomena as the rise of microbreweries in a market long dominated by a handful of beer conglomerates. He points out that with its immigrant influences and agricultural diversity, the U.S. should be hospitable to spreading...
...needed a ticket, more precious than a passport out of Kosovo, and a fluorescent handstamp with the 20th Century Fox logo. Security guards, as imposing as the Fruit of Islam, eyed you through four separate checkpoints. Inside the theater, an official requested that audience members turn in anyone who might be camcording the event. George Lucas' Star Wars films may celebrate the spirit of communal rebellion, but the first critics' screening of Episode 1: The Phantom Menace in New York City last week had a sulfurous scent of the Empire about...
...know Kurt Andersen. Everyone knows Kurt Andersen (especially here at TIME, where he was on staff for six years). I just know him less well than everybody else does, so it falls to me to review Turn of the Century (Random House; 659 pages; $24.95), his novel about the world in which "everyone" can be defined as the people Kurt Andersen knows...
...capitalizes handsomely on the freedom afforded by fiction (so many more people you can zing without fear of libel!), Andersen is hamstrung by the overall structure that the genre demands. His sentences may sparkle, but the book's forward motion is a sputtering lope. Its loose, digressive shape makes Turn of the Century awfully easy to put down...
...right, of course, and his own ironic take sometimes makes him seem so arch you could almost drive through him. But it is nonetheless a joy to watch him at work, ricocheting off everything putrid and tinny in our culture. Whatever you call the thing after postmodern, Turn of the Century is it--something post-postmodern, a commentary on commentary. That may not make much of a novel, but it sure is fun to read...