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Fittingly, in a season when the Great White Way once again has an inner glow, this most Broadwayesque of musicals leads the way. It has been a season of powerhouse new plays by August Wilson, Herb Gardner, Neil Simon, Brian Friel and Richard Nelson. It has been a season of movie- and TV-star glitter -- Jessica Lange, Alec Baldwin and Amy Madigan in A Streetcar Named Desire; Glenn Close, Gene Hackman and Richard Dreyfuss in Ariel Dorfman's politically inflamed Death and the Maiden; fast-rising Larry Fishburne, direct from the angry film Boyz N the Hood to Wilson...
WRITING IS A SIMPLE, RHYTHMIC EXERcise, like hitting a major-league curve ball, and sometimes you go 0 for June. The usually peerless Larry McMurtry, author of Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show, two funny, sad, marvelously human novels about the Southwest, misses badly with THE EVENING STAR (Simon & Schuster; $23). The new novel, a sequel to Terms of Endearment, is big, flabby and aimless. It picks up Terms' Aurora Greenway in her 70s and deals lengthily with the impotence of her 80-year-old lover, who has taken to exposing himself. There's more, equally jokey and unfunny...
PUBLISHER: SIMON & SCHUSTER; 464 PAGES...
CHUNKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT WERE written by -- a woman! So went the sales- boosting claim of Harold Bloom in 1990's The Book of J. Bloom booms again in the preposterous, opinionated, thoroughly entertaining THE AMERICAN RELIGION (Simon & Schuster; $22). The eminent Yale critic, who sees religion as "spilled poetry," turns tastemaker on U.S.-made faiths, especially Southern Baptism, where he stumbles badly, and Mormonism, which he lauds for odd originality. Pentecostalism? "Daring." New Age? Can't read the stuff. A portentous subtitle transmits Bloom's wish: "The Emergence of the Post- Christian Nation." Oh, yes. Bloom thinks America...
...need not bother. Such a deal -- but hark! Novelist Haughton Murphy does all this and is funny in the bargain. His hero is an elderly, retired lawyer named Reuben Frost, who keeps getting into other people's trouble. In this seventh outing in the series, A VERY VENETIAN MURDER (Simon & Schuster; $19), Frost and his wife Cynthia are taking their ease in Venice when someone murders an American dress designer. The soft-boiled detective is 77, and when danger threatens, he takes a nap. Or nibbles a nine-star lunch with Cynthia. But in the end he nails the villain...