Richard Belfield, Christopher Hird, and Sharon Kelly. MURDOCH: The
Great Escape (Penguin, #6.99).
* THIS is an updating of the same team's 1992 book Murdoch: Decline Of
An Empire, and is substantially the same except for the last two
chapters, which describe the with one mighty bound our hero was free
miracle which the Dirty Gold-Digger has since wrought. The facts are
almost incredible, but convincing; the figures are telephone numbers;
and the whole is quite revelatory of how the sometimes financially shaky
Murdoch machine is kept turning by its master's hypnotic brand of snake
oil. Read it and weep, because Rupe's back -- if not bigger, then more
influential and craftier than ever. Why does the world let him away with
it?
Walter Abish. ECLIPSE FEVER (Faber, #6.99).
* HAVING written one novel which was itself a 200-page question, How
German Is It?, Walter Abish turns his interrogatory eye on the
transformation of America from continent into theme park. Set in Mexico,
Eclipse Fever is a complex tale of the appropriation of Aztec art by
rich collectors and of the US's culture-as-commodity mentality spilling
across its backyard -- in the middle of which, cuckolded critic
Alejandro tries to discover a sense of his own heritage unmediated by
white European values. Provocative and witty, Abish's catechistic style
teases out the contradictory relationship between Latin America and its
wealthy neighbour, asking How American Is It? and giving a depressing
and cautionary answer.
Jay McInerney (editor). COWBOYS, INDIANS AND COMMUTERS: The Penguin
Book Of New American Voices (Penguin, #9.99).
* ACCORDING to Jay McInerney in his introduction, the influence of the
Dirty Realists on the American short story was so great that, by the
late eighties, ''the American frontier seemed to be located somewhere
between the kitchen sink and the Hibachi in the backyard. Nature was the
lawn''. While some would argue that this sure beat the insides of
nightclubs filled with preppie nihilists, this anthology of authors
first published in the nineties (including Donna Tartt and William T.
Vollmann) backs up his claim that diversity is once more the rule rather
than the exception. Vistas explored stretch from Native American
reservations to the streets of New York, with Jeffrey Eugenides once
more confirming his status as one of the brightest young things around.
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