Word: nathanael
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...lives by a code of honor in a world of thugs and well-heeled thieves. Moments later the story shifts to the office (coyly labeled a "cell") where his creator labors as a hireling of a movie tycoon more crass, smug and fascinatingly awful than any envisioned by Nathanael West. As the tycoon (Rene Auberjonois) lays down the law (no social criticism, no politics, no hint of kinky sex), the moneystruck young writer (Gregg Edelman) peevishly retypes his scenes -- and, in an inspired bit of playfulness, that action causes his characters to move and speak jerkily backward...
...biography, S.J. Perelman: A Life, points out what any sensible reader already knows: humorists are not a sunny breed. They pick up their tribulations by the wrong end, and that provokes mirth. But after the audience leaves, the anguish remains. Perelman's boon companion and brother- in-law, Novelist Nathanael West (Miss Lonelyhearts), died young (36) in a car crash. Perelman never fully recovered from the blow, nor did his wife Laura, who descended into alcoholism. Many of his best letters deal obliquely with the disappointments he felt with his family and his work: he did not write a full...
Anyone who reads has toured parts of this fun house before. Budd Schulberg and Nathanael West spurned it in novels. Elderly actresses and directors have told gaudy lies to their tape recorders. What Author Otto Friedrich contributes in City of Nets (Harper & Row; 512 pages; $25) is a lucid, darkly funny recounting that threads the loopy stories and the titanic egos into a coherent narrative. Friedrich, a TIME senior writer, clearly cherishes the surreal nuttiness of Hollywood's great days...
...generation, Perelman absorbed himself in pulp literature and vaudeville. When he became a cartoonist and writer at Brown University, the melodramatic phrase coupled with the antic gesture were indispensable parts of his technique. Another campus satirist derived from the same origins: Nathan Weinstein, soon to be better known as Nathanael West, the author of Miss Lonelyhearts. The two men were close friends, then relatives when Perelman married West's sister Laura. It was not, Herrmann reports, a conventional union. Early on, the Perelmans went to Hollywood, where a fellow scenarist, Dashiell Hammett, once noted, "Last night I ran into...
Unless, of course, Glynn is telling the gag as a shaggy-building story. He floods the eye and ear with bizarre images and improvised prose. It is as if the plumbing in a conventional novel had burst, swirling the styles of Gunter Grass, Nathanael West, William Burroughs, Stanley Elkin, John Irving and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (without the enchantment of a safe distance and exotic folklore...