Remember eyeglasses? Microwave ovens? Fax machines? Sure, since they're all still part of modern life, but for how much longer? How soon before they join girdles, slide rules and leisure suits on the junk pile of America's 20th century? Social change and its debris is the subject of this breezy collection of essays and black-and-white photos, which wisely opts for a playful approach to commemorating 71 items that may not make it to the year 2000.
The fun here is not only in marveling at how innocent and clunky life seemed only a short while back (was it really just three decades ago that TV antennas had to be adjusted every time you changed the channel?) but in pinpointing the sociological and technological forces that wiped out certain American staples. Men's garters were as common as ties until the hosiery industry created socks with elasticized tops. Fast-food franchises killed off soda fountains, Barbie shredded paper dolls. Gone, too, are milkmen (supermarkets), drive-in movies (home videos), even teenage "dating" (the sexual revolution).
Along with these anachronisms Going, Going, Gone earmarks a few everyday items destined to disappear—typewriters, vinyl records, hotel keys—and gives them a last, loving look. Anybody who is a little dazed by today's relentless digital revolution will appreciate this book's nostalgic pull; reading it feels like pausing a scary movie on your soon-to-be-obsolete VCR. (Chronicle, $18.95)
by Judith Krantz
Okay, got a pencil? In Judith (Scruples) Krantz's eighth novel we meet Gigi Orsini, bright, beautiful daughter of film producer Vito Orsini, the former husband of Scruples heroine Billy Ikehorn. Gigi is living with director Zach Nevsky, who not only works for Vito but is the brother of her best friend, Sasha, who is soon to marry Vito and become...Get this: Gigi's stepmother. Along comes Ben Winthrop, Ikehorn's superrich cousin, who meets Gigi and makes her professional and personal offers it would be hard for any girl to refuse.
Will Gigi: (a) work out her obviously confused relationship with her father and best friend, (b) triumph in the advertising business by using her connections with Winthrop to outsmart her archrival Victoria Frost, herself the subject of a separate dysfunctional family-subplot, © realize that Winthrop—with his million-dollar gifts and stunning sexual prowess—is too good to be true?
Oh, what an obvious plot we weave. But then, who reads Krantz for the story? We read her instead for her delicious name dropping, her unapologetic rich-lady sensibility and her occasionally quirky notions. ("Did Heathcliff have a last name or was that his first name?" Sash Nevsky muses. "Joe Heathcliff? Heathcliff Jones?")
Even this otherwise mediocre Krantz work has enough of those elements to keep us reading. This summer, expect lots of Lovers at the beach. (Crown, $23)
by William Trevor
In a departure from the world of fiction that he usually inhabits, William Trevor, best known for his short stories, has written autobiographical sketches that prove his memories are as rich as his imagination.
The son of a Protestant bank clerk, Trevor grew up in southern Ireland in the 1930s. After graduating from Dublin's Trinity College, he taught at a prep school and worked as a copy writer for an ad agency in London. As he chronicles these experiences or his later travels abroad, Trevor is guided by a sense of humor and an eye for the unusual.
Whether writing about his parents ("They were victims of their innocence when chance threw them together and passion beguiled them") or a colonic surgeon with shaky hands (It's quite safe, reassures Trevor, "the stomach's enormous. People don't realize"), he renders their proclivities and idiosyncracies poetically, comically and lovingly.
Deftly illustrated with pencil and charcoal drawings by Lucy Willis, Excursions reveals a writer practicing his craft in full form. (Knopf, $23)
by Marc Gunther
Appearing in the wake of Diane Sawyer's re-signing with ABC News at a reported $7 million a year, Gunther's smoothly written study of the network division and its Olympian president, Roone Arledge, could not be more timely. With an insider's feel, a scholar's perspective and apparent cooperation from almost everyone involved, Gunther, a Detroit News reporter, has produced an illuminating look inside TV news.
Arledge is certainly among, the most fascinating—and gossiped-about—characters in the business. First in the '60s at ABC Sports, and especially since he took the reins of the news division in 1977, Arledge has displayed "an uncanny ability to discern what viewers wanted, sometimes before they knew it themselves."
Pioneering an intimate approach to coverage, Arledge shrewdly used his checkbook to promote and steal the news superstars who could deliver: Ted Koppel, Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings, Sam Donaldson and Sawyer, to name a few. "Inside ABC News, he played the role of distant father—remote and demanding—with the result that his charges went to extraordinary lengths to excel," writes Gunther. And like scorpions in a bottle—and by Arledge's design—they sometimes went to extraordinary lengths to sting each other as well as the rival networks. (Gunther relates how 20/20 even tried to swipe Donaldson and Sawyer's premiere scoop—an interview with wayward pilot Thomas Root.)
Always a head above the contentious, Everest-sized egos stands the towering and maddening Roone himself: proposing, wheedling, commanding. His clout has been diminished since Capital Cities took over ABC in 1986, and Arledge, now 62, has weathered a bout with prostate cancer. But he still retains at least the aura ascribed by one former 20/20 producer, who likens him to a character from Aristophanes of whom it was said: "They love him, they hate him, they cannot live without him." (Little, Brown, $23.95)
by Marge Piercy
It's hard to imagine what these three have in common. There's Leila Landsman, a middle-aged writer who finally divorces her philandering husband; Mary Burke, Leila's secretly homeless cleaning lady; and Becky Burgess, a middle-class housewife who convinces her teen lover to murder her husband. But in this absorbing novel, Piercy connects these disparate lives, finding that their needs and desires are remarkably similar.
The connections are precarious. (The way Leila finds Mary a home is a contrivance; ditto Leila's lesbian friend who serves as a kind of Greek chorus to criticize men.) But Piercy's sense of time and place are extraordinary.
Mary is particularly affecting, a woman who has been abandoned by her upper-middle-class husband and then by society. Like Becky (obviously based on Pamela Smart, the New Hampshire schoolteacher who persuaded her teenage lover to kill her husband in 1990) and Leila, Mary is a powerful example of how women fight for their dignity in the most unspeakable circumstances.
To repeat that point while keeping the reader eagerly turning pages is Piercy's most notable achievement. (Fawcett, $22)
by Brooke Stevens
A vacation turns into a nightmare for Alex Barton when his wife, Iris, volunteers for Father Fish's circus magic act, steps into a box and vanishes. The next morning, the circus has disappeared, leaving Alex with two handwritten tickets and no explanations.
Alex endures every pain and humiliation in his quest for his missing wife, starting with a stint as a soldier in the army of Edward Volenti, the bizarre inventor of a circus hidden on the island of Cea. Alex is tortured, seduced, forced lo fight to the death. He's taught to juggle, throw knives and the most spectacular feat of all: to eat macaroni while balanced on a tightrope.
The author, who once worked as a circus roustabout and animal groom, brings passion to his first novel. Unfortunately, the plot keeps slipping away, and the promise of a story is bogged down in a series of episodic adventures that question what is real. (Harcourt Brace, $23)
by Patrick McGilligan
Even at 56, Jack Nicholson drips hedonism: he's a paunchy Peter Pan with Lakers tickets. But America's most beloved rascal is also one of it's best actors. This book dissects his career, not his carousing.
McGilligan, a celebrity journalist who has interviewed Nicholson in the past but not for this unauthorized biography, dutifully charts Jack's rise to stardom, from the drug-filled days of Easy Rider all the way to Hoffa. His book richly details the making of a dud like Goin' South, for instance, but skimps on key milestones like Nicholson's failed marriage, his tumultuous romance with Angelica Huston and his recent fathering of two children.
Jack's Life does delve into Nicholson's murky genealogy (the woman he thought was his sister was actually his mother), tracing the actor's noncommittal nature back to a fatherless past. Beyond this, there's little insight into Nicholson's complexity: He's intensely private but goes to Lakers games without a bodyguard; he's terrified of the cancer that killed his mother but smokes incessantly. McGilligan drops in such contradictions without much explanation.
Too bad, since America's fascination with Nicholson is based as much on his epic bacchanalian lifestyle as on his movies. It certainly inches us closer to Jack, however, to know that an ex-lover claims he keeps up his strength during lovemaking by eating peanut-butter sandwiches. (Norton, S25)
>Judith Krantz
A CREATURE OF HABIT
"I'M SO USED TO PEOPLE SAYING, 'Now that you've made enough money with these best-sellers, isn't it time to write a really good book?' " notes Judith Krantz, 68. "Now would anyone have said to Irving Berlin, 'You could write like Mozart if you tried,' or to Willy Nelson, 'It's time you wrote an opera'? They don't understand that I'm writing the best I can, each time."
To do so, Krantz keeps to an uncompromising routine. She begins her writing day at 10 a.m., suited up in an old silk blouse, sweatpants and fuzzy "bunny slippers." Although the spacious office in her elegant Bel Air home offers an arbor view, Krantz writes facing a corner wall covered with needlework samplers. "Things women do with their hands," she says, "send off good vibes." Lunch is prepared at 12:30; Krantz nibbles on chicken salad while scribbling dialogue. Then it's back to the computer until 3:00, when she surrenders to "a sugar festival—whole wheat toast heaped with strawberry jam and dark tea with sugar—which gives me enough energy to work until 5:00."
To relieve a chronic backache, Krantz tops off her workday with either a deep muscle massage or a visit from her personal trainer. After a calorie-conscious dinner with her producer husband, Steve, 70, she settles in for an evening of sitcoms or books. "I never read fiction when I'm writing because it disturbs my own style," says Krantz. "And I don't try to dream about my work in progress," she notes. "You do need some time off."
- Contributors:
- Alex Tresniowski,
- Sara Nelson,
- Kristin McMurran,
- Thomas Curwen,
- Dick Friedman,
- Louisa Ermelino.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
