Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...father left the family when she was two years old. "I'm still reeling from it," says Fisher. "It makes an impression on you." Still, any references to Dad are conspicuously missing from the self-avowed roman a clef. "My route to intimacy is routine," writes Fisher's fictional protagonist. "I establish a pattern with somebody, and then I notice when they're not there." Looks like this is one case where absence did not make the heart grow fonder...
Alnilam's protagonist is Frank Cahill, an Atlanta amusement-park and swimming-pool owner who has recently been blinded by diabetes. He learns that his son Joel is missing and presumed dead after a military aircraft training accident in North Carolina. Cahill and his touchy German shepherd Zack travel to Peckover air base to learn more, even though father has never laid eyes on son. Cahill had been abandoned by his wife shortly before Joel was born, 19 years earlier...
...devoted fan and a merciless editor can each make harsh demands on a writer. For Novelist Paul Sheldon, Stephen King's protagonist, both are lumped together in Annie Wilkes, "a woman full of tornadoes waiting to happen." Trapped in Annie's house, Sheldon finds her a skilled practitioner with ax and carving knife who wants to cut his body as well as his prose. He is forced to write, just for her, another in his series featuring Misery Chastain, darling of supermarket bookracks. At first playing Scheherazade to her, he ends up playing Scheherazade to himself: he will...
...CHINAMEN are made, not born, my dear," exclaims Tam Lum, the protagonist of Frank Chin's The Chickencoop Chinaman. Chin's drama, Harvard's first Asian American theatrical production, explores this angry youth's problemmatic quest for cultural identity...
...Mating Birds. The novel begins, "In a few days I am to die," but the common 20th century technique of telling a story from the end is not carried off with particular novelty or innovation. So far as contemporary novels go, the plot is largely predictable. It follows the protagonist, Sibiya, from a Zula reservation to his enrollment in school, to expulsion after participation in anti-apartheid riots, to his progressive obsession with Veronica at a beach, to forbidden copulation in her bungalow, to discovery, trial and sentencing. There are few surprises in the novel, and certain scenes seem like...