Fifteen interviews of both literary and commercial novelists, recorded over the past two decades by Bonetti for the American Audio Prose Library and all originally published in the Missouri Review. As the editors point out in their introduction, these writers are ``chronologically postmodern.'' True, but few of the novelists, who include Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison, John Edgar Wideman, Rosellen Brown, Scott Turow, Robb Forman Dew, and Jessica Hagedorn, would seem to fit the self-conscious, often playful, ``metafictional'' postmodern vein of writers like John Barth, William Gaddis, or Thomas Pynchon. The interviews are more about ideas, publishing histories, and reputations than about craft. Robert Stone, interviewed in 1982, says those who interpret the underlying message in his writing as ``Despair and die'' are mistaken. He cites Dickens as a role model for his ability to entertain himself and his readers with plot. His favorite novel? The Great Gatsby. Jamaica Kincaid (1991) desribes writing New Yorker ``Talk of the Town'' pieces as excellent preparation for fiction writing. What's missing largely from these interviews are technical discussions of the mechanics of writing dialogue and fleshing out characters, and of working methods (who uses a journal, who writes longhand or by typewriter or computer), the ecstasy and grind of composition. But these lacks don't detract from the information we are given. One of the best pieces is the talk with Louise Erdrich and the late Michael Dorris, conducted in 1986. The husband-and-wife team discuss the general strategy of their unusual collaborationist writing approach—they plot their novels together, but one or the other does the first draft; that person's name then goes on the finished product, such as Love Medicine (hers) and A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (his). Like a selection of one-act plays, these conversations offer illuminating if limited glimpses of contemporary writing careers.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8262-1136-4
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
An expert blend of musical and social history, illuminating one of the cultural cores of America's ``Gilded Age.'' In the 1880s, as accurately depicted in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, the upper echelons of New York society flocked to Faust (a scene carefully retained in Martin Scorsese's recent film version). But by the 1890s, Wagner fever had overtaken America's most ardent opera patrons, and not in New York alone. This is the world that Horowitz (The Ivory Trade, 1990, etc.) reveals in his fascinating, gracefully written study of American Wagnerism. Currently executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, formerly a New York Times music critic, and a long-time student of the interplay between musical art and national culture, Horowitz orders his narrative around the parallel careers of the conductor Anton Seidl and the New York Tribune critic Henry Krehbiel. He evokes an era when issues of aesthetics and musical philosophy were the common currency of middle-class discussion. From the viewpoint of today's world, in which the column inches devoted to serious arts criticism in the daily papers have shrunk to virtually nothing, fin-de-siäcle America was, musically and intellectually, an enviably lively place. Wagner's works dominated the stage, and his music and ``ideas'' were the subject of passionate debate. To this extent, Horowitz proves his thesis that the ``Gay '90s'' were not the crass, lowbrow scene its detractors have claimed. One fascinating recurrent theme in this study is the positive impact of Wagnerism on emerging feminism at the turn of the century. It appears that a majority of American Wagnerites were women, and the idea of Brunnhilde (as well as the regal dramatic sopranos who portrayed her) fit neatly with the notion of the ``New Woman'' then sweeping the nation. A work of engrossing scholarship about an important, unjustly ignored slice of our artistic past.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-08394-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
As is to be expected from Lessing (The Real Thing; 1992, etc.), whose clear and always intelligent no-nonsense writing has explored subjects that transcend the commonplace, this first volume of her autobiography reflects all her remarkable strengths. The year of her birth, 1919, was auspicious neither for her parents in particular nor for the world in general. The ill-matched Taylers had married not out of love but out of a mutual need to expunge the horror of the recently ended world war, which had maimed Lessing's father both physically and mentally — he'd lost a leg in battle, but more important, be was embittered by what he considered Britain's poor treatment of her soldiers. Her mother, an able nurse, had lost a fiancÉ, and marriage now seemed to offer only the consolation of children. These disappointments, exacerbated by the harsh life in rural Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), where her family settled after a stint in Persia, would indelibly shape Lessing. She quarreled frequently with her mother, whose well-meaning strictures she resented; observed her father's despair and his failures as a settler-farmer; and resolved that she would not live like them — "I will not, I will not!" — even if it meant defying convention. Which she did, as she left her first husband and their two children for another man — Gottried Lessing; joined the local Communist Party in the midst of WW II "because of the spirit of the times, because of the Zeitgeist"; and then moved in 1949 permanently to London. Like so many bright and alienated provincials, Lessing found an escape in voracious reading. Though determined to be a writer, the consuming distractions of motherhood, wartime society, and political activities frustrated this ambition for a long time. Refreshingly, not a self-indulgent mea culpa, but a brutally frank examination of how Lessing became what she is — a distinguished writer, a woman who has lived life to the full, and a constant critic of cant.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-017150-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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