Volume 46, Number 3 · February 18, 1999
The Art of Losing
By Michael Wood
Evening
by Susan Minot
Knopf, 264 pp., $23.00
Model Behavior
by Jay McInerney
Knopf, 277 pp., $24.00
The Evolution of Jane
by Cathleen Schine
Houghton Mifflin, 210 pp., $24.00
Scarcely anyone now turns to novels, as so many once did, for direct information about the world. We are more likely to consult memoirs, biographies, histories, interviews, surveys—assuming we go to books at all, and are not already amply briefed by newspapers and radio and film and television, overwhelmed by news, talk shows, phone-ins, gossip columns, and those in-depth investigations which remind us how far down the surface goes. We don't expect novels to tell us the way we live now, in Trollope's phrase: only the way we don't live, or would like to live, or think we live.
Review, 4438 words
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