Word: tales
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With apologies to Charles Dickens this year's Harvard basketball season has been a tale of two teams...
...winter of '87, nine months before reality iced Wall Street. Erdman does not have to worry; quicker than a program trade, here he is, hedging his investments with a sixth novel. The Palace offers no scenario for economic disaster. Quite the contrary. The book is a racy tale of how one clever and gutsy (though not especially honest) fellow can rise from being a Philadelphia coin dealer to owning the splashiest gambling casinos in Las Vegas and Atlantic City...
...notoriety (previous ventures included posing nude, for $70,000, for Playboy). Readers in search of easy, sleazy entertainment, however, are in for a surprise. The narrative is shot through with the pain of any marital breakup, especially when small children are involved, and emerges as a feminist cautionary tale about the futility of devoting one's life to pleasing others. With pitiable candor the author portrays herself as a poor, under-educated country girl who thought she had no way up except through a man, and no way to hold a man except through her body, fun-loving spirit...
...core of the two best new British plays on view in London within the past year, one discussed for a New York City staging, the other already installed. The possible transfer, Simon Gray's Melon, cues playgoers in from the start that they are entering tragic terrain: its tale of a happy man's abrupt tumble into lunacy is recounted first person in the chill of retrospect, after an equally arbitrary, untrustworthy recovery. The other play, Alan Ayckbourn's more complex Woman in Mind, gives audiences no such easy signposts and thus achieves an even richer mixture of laughter...
...Navy man who made gentle fun of that service in Don't Go Near the Water, his popular 1956 novel (remember Glenn Ford in the movie?), is serious on this voyage. Instead of another hardware-heavy Tom Clancy naval thriller like The Hunt for Red October, Brinkley's tale has humanity, thoughtfulness and one inspired complication: women. On the Nathan James, not surprisingly nowadays in this man's Navy, 32 crew members are female. Sexual tension and just plain tension mount as the ship, food and fuel dwindling, scours the globe for a habitable place to settle down...