Word: authorizations
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...Quincunx by Charles Palliser. Roughly half a million words long, this extravagant narrative is a faithful re-creation of the 19th century British novel -- lots of them, including Bleak House, Great Expectations and Jane Eyre. Miraculously, this bald-faced imitation works wonders. The author makes the distant world of Victorian fiction, with its careful plotting and moral punctiliousness, as gripping as tomorrow's whodunit...
Symposium by Muriel Spark. Ten guests assemble for a fashionable London dinner party, with no idea of just how murderously interesting the affair will turn out to be. The author here approaches the sinister elegance of her The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). She introduces fundamental issues -- salvation and sin, inspiration and insanity, free will and destiny -- through the medium of light but lethal comedy...
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. Devotees waited 17 years for the author to outdo his apocalyptic Gravity's Rainbow (1973). What they got instead was a kinder, gentler Pynchon. This saga of wilting '60s flower children, circa 1984, on the lam from federal narcs, displays much of the author's old virtuosity: stunning erudition and terminal paranoia coupled with the hard-edged loopiness of cartoons. That is not surprising; the happy ending...
...Glory: The Life of William S. Paley by Sally Bedell Smith. Paley, the founder of CBS and a Manhattan socialite, died not a moment too soon to avoid seeing himself debunked in this best-selling biography. "Paley," says the author, "was as spoiled as a man could be." By the end of her razor- edged narrative, Smith has cut her subject down to where he would have trouble filling a 12-in. screen...
...Chinese Mosaic by Bette Bao Lord. When Lord went to fetch her father's ashes from a Red Chinese prison, she was told that his ears had been torn off. It was all she had to hear to know that the official report of suicide was a lie. The author, wife of the former ambassador to China Winston Lord, confronts 40 years of cultural distortion in the People's Republic...