Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...second novel, the former Bad Boy of Tennis again displays an intimate knowledge of the international tournament scene and an insensitivity to the niceties of plot and narrative. This time out the protagonist, Istvan Horwat, is an East European champion who conquers Wimbledon and women until a little orphan forces him to abandon the Egomania Open. She is Natasha Kotany, the daughter of friends killed in a plane crash. Under Horwat's avuncular gaze, the girl blossoms into a beautiful woman and a court phenom. One night she astonishes him, if no one else, by inquiring, "Haven't you understood...
Unemployed, estranged from love and family, Doug wonders if redemption is possible in the throes of mid-life. It is, and therein lies the book's forgivable flaw. Without warning, the author seems to suffer a failure of nerve, as if the pain of his protagonist were too much for the reader (or perhaps the screen) to bear. Until its sun-washed finale, 50 maintains Corman's gift for putting acute observations in a comic package. But this time out, buyers should discard the pretty pink wrap...
Author Carrie Fisher, the actress daughter of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, has been through drug problems of her own and gives her protagonist the kind of humor born from pain, anger and a strong will to live. The narrative voice is a bit like Holden Caulfield playing the Borscht Belt: "I'm a flash and the world is my pan." And: "I guess that's how guys are thoughtful in the '80s -- they accompany girls to their abortions." Postcards, which is really five connected vignettes, loses its bite when it strays from its emotional base in the clinic...
...protagonist cannot fit on the walls. Berlin itself is the great metaphor, indeed the cause, of the lack of assurance and wholeness emitted by its postwar art. No city in northern Europe, except London, is more impacted with history; at the same time, none speaks with such dreadful plainness of the fragility of historical memory. You see a featureless tract of new buildings in an American city and merely sigh with boredom; the same tract in Berlin is raised on the rubble and corpses of 1945 -- the new is also a tomb...
Sailors once dreaded the blue Sargasso Sea, believing its gulfweed could entangle them forever. The protagonist of William McPherson's novel fears entrapment in other currents. Andrew MacAllister, 40, an American playwright, is lured by the danger of adultery while in London to open one of his plays. He feels "controlled by urgent signals other than his own." Later, when he and his wife Ann, "the couple on the wedding cake," are on vacation in Bermuda, he has a homosexual encounter and is shocked to find that his body continually horrifies him. In McPherson's fine first novel Testing...