Word: writer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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SOME CAN WHISTLE by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster; $19.95). Some of McMurtry's good books, like Terms of Endearment, have been turned into good movies. Alas, this novel, about a feckless millionaire TV writer discovering his daughter from a long-ago marriage, is not a good book. Wait for the inevitable screen adaptation...
...stripping away of false issues between the brothers (Why is Jack always late for gigs? Why does Frank fuss so much about his bald spot?) as they get down to the true ones (involving, naturally, their childhood and piano lessons) is done with similar subtlety. Kloves' delicacy as a writer is, moreover, matched by his restraint as a director. It would have been easy to patronize or satirize the less than fabulous milieu of The Fabulous Baker Boys. Instead he and his fine cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, have created a gently dislocating noirish mood -- not quite menacing but not exactly comfortable...
This turns out to be T.R. (Tyler Rose), the only child of Deck's only marriage. She has read in Parade magazine that he is "the richest writer in the world" and has decided to lay some expensive guilt on him for 22 years of neglect. He -- as hapless as any sitcom daddy -- rushes off to rescue her from her low-rent life in Houston. When he gets there, he finds that his daughter is a foul-mouthed, dope-smoking mother of two small children, both of whose fathers are in prison...
...gods continue to smile on Nicholas Gage, a writer who knows how to tell a good story and, even better, has a good story to tell. His 1983 memoir, Eleni, pulled the reader into the pitiless Greek civil war of the late 1940s, when Communists fought to destroy the royalist government. Gage told how the Reds came to his mountain village to round up children for indoctrination in Albania. His mother resisted and smuggled him and three of his sisters to safety. For her defiance, Eleni was tortured, shot, and her body thrown into a ravine...
...WRITER-REPORTERS: Edward M. Gomez, Alain L. Sanders...