Word: novelistic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...fireside talks to an average of two or three a year, in contrast to the modern presidential practice of weekly radio addresses. Timed at dramatic moments, they commanded gigantic audiences, larger than any other program on the radio, including the biggest prizefights and the most popular comedy shows. The novelist Saul Bellow recalls walking down the street on a hot summer night in Chicago while Roosevelt was speaking. Through lit windows, families could be seen sitting at their kitchen table or gathered in the parlor listening to the radio. Under the elm trees, "drivers had pulled over, parking bumper...
...Sensation" (to borrow the title of the recent Brooklyn Museum of Art show) and debate not the subtleties of high craftsmanship but the appropriateness of public funding--talk about power!--for works that large segments of that public, not all of them ignoramuses, deplore. Strolling the latest Venice Biennale, novelist (and art critic) John Updike observed that it was nearly impossible to find anything that "reminded one of art in the old sense, even in the older modern sense," since "the desire to shock...had become veritably frantic...
...Alfred Hitchcock made a film of it a year later, though he dared include only one of the book's two murders. Soon after, the woman whom screenwriter Michael Tolkin (The Player) calls "our best expatriate since Henry James" left for Europe, where she was welcomed as an important novelist, not just a thriller writer. From this pleasant remove, she wrote of another ruthlessly imaginative expat, Tom Ripley...
...Novelist Price obviously wants to believe in Jesus as the true Son of God--and he experienced a strong personal clue as evidence of that belief. But Price suffers from the modern malaise of skepticism, owing in large part to the unproved notion that the Gospels couldn't be actual history because they were composed many years after Jesus died. REMI G. DUBUQUE Southington, Conn...
DIED. JOSEPH HELLER, 76, darkly comic novelist and World War II veteran whose classic Catch-22 detailed the madness of war; in East Hampton, N.Y. The famous catch he created in 1961: "If [a pilot] flew [missions] he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and he had to" (see Eulogy...