Word: authorities
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stability-impaired wordsmith we met 15 years ago in author Friedman's earlier novel About Harry Towns is still frisky, still foolish. Still capable, in fact, of careering into a writers' bar in lower Manhattan wearing, because of a recent mugging, only a sheet, and this early in a long evening. Friedman is funny and reliably irrelevant. Writing, he seems to be saying, is less dignified than the mail-order truss business, which is a truth on which to hang your...
...buildings fallen to ruin. His hero, Joe Starling, is a brilliant painter who no longer paints (hello there, Papa H.). Becalmed, then stirred by the faintest of internal winds, he returns from the staleness of the East Coast to Montana, where he has inherited a cattle spread. Here the author novelizes industriously, with small effect. Events occur; characters are brought to life, then enter, speak and exit; but Joe remains a not very interesting puzzle to himself and the reader. Only Montana itself is luminous, and for a few paragraphs here and there McGuane is still a marvelous writer...
...Gage did not pull the trigger. "There are times when I wake up at night and want to get back on a plane and kill the son of a bitch," Gage said. A Place for Us overlaps that past and goes on to embrace less heroic lifetimes, mainly the author's and that of his father. Yet each life is gallant for its own reasons. Christos Gatzoyiannis passed through Ellis Island first in 1910, and again in 1938. He headed for Worcester, Mass., where he built a steady vegetable-delivery business while his wife remained in the northwestern Greek town...
...Nikola, his father's biggest failing was not getting his family to the U.S. in time to save Eleni. The resentment colors Gage's transformation from a greenhorn with an unpronounceable name to an American success story bylined Nicholas Gage. Only when the author has his own family does he come to understand the difference between a mother's love and a father...
Gage relives his father's American Dream more passionately than his own. The author's exploits are subordinated to the old man's: his struggles to sustain his clan and make sure that his daughters find suitable (meaning Greek) husbands. Gatzoyiannis' death at age 90 provides a classic resolution. Surrounded by his children and grandchildren, he drifts off on old memories. It is a scene that evokes Chekhov and his observation that "any idiot can face a crisis. It is this day-to-day living that wears...