Word: offing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Having shakily returned to some semblance of their former lives, the reluctant celebs pass in the night (actually, at lunch at the Ivy), where John falls in love with Susan as a delayed result of the modern equivalent of an angelic visitation: while he was hospitalized, her staticky face mingled...
It's better to be a fake nobody than a real somebody. Contra Tom Ripley, this is the conclusion reached by the two lead characters in Miss Wyoming (Pantheon; 311 pages; $23), Douglas Coupland's witty and hyper discourse on celebrity. Like much of his previous work (Generation X, Microserfs...
Susan Colgate and John Johnson are two former Hollywood luminaries, on the verge of becoming trivia questions, who share a history of disappearing. She, a faded sitcom actress and the erstwhile beauty queen of the title, once emerged unscathed from a plane crash, taking advantage of her freak escape to...
John's febrile love and the mystery of Susan's subsequent (willing? unwilling?) redisappearance drive the novel's rather implausible plot, which relies too much on coincidence. But for those willing to surrender themselves to Coupland's inventively of-the-minute language ("You two are the most drag-and-click...
Tracy Chevalier is cautious with fact and adventurous with fiction in her novel, aptly titled Girl with a Pearl Earring (Dutton; 240 pages; $23.95). Vermeer's activities as an art dealer and tavern operator are not pushed further than the thready historical record. Greit, on the other hand, is a...