Volume 45, Number 17 · November 5, 1998
Escape Artists
By Hilary Mantel
The Last Resort
by Alison Lurie
Henry Holt, 321 pp., $22.00
Park City: New and Selected Stories
by Ann Beattie
Knopf, 478 pp., $25.00
A Patchwork Planet
by Anne Tyler
Knopf, 288 pp., $24.00
It is dangerous to stray outside New England, to places where the chill predictabilities of winter are overlapped by the warm ocean currents of self-indulgence and self-deceit: to places where the bracing necessities of shoveling snow are replaced by the velvet and slippery deceptions of bodily warmth. Harry DeKroll entertains mild regrets for Key West in the days when it offered 'the great escape,' for days when easily available mind-altering substances adjusted reality more effectively than today's intake of con leche and Oprah. Harry the Housesitter is the narrator of Ann Beattie's new story 'The Siamese Twins Go Snorkeling.' He stands by and watches someone else get a life (and employ him to service it), while he himself is occupied with work on 'Great American Novel about drifters in Key West; yes, it will have been written before, but ne'er so well expressed.'
Review, 4339 words
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