In ”White Noise,” Don DeLillo`s savage comedy of high-tech anxiety in academic spheres, there occurs the following timely dialogue:
”We ought to have an official Day of the Dead. Like the Mexicans.”
”We do. It`s called Super Bowl Week.”
This and a great many other satirical passages are among the numerous reasons that, 11 months later, DeLillo`s novel wins an American Book Award as the year`s best fiction.
MARCH 5
Fans of Ring Lardner rally in Albion, Mich., to celebrate the 100th birthday of the mordant humorist and sportswriter. But one of the key celebrants, book critic Jonathan Yardley, who once wrote an admiring biography of Lardner, throws a wicked curve at his audience–including a few Lardner relatives–by declaring that their hero was a ”distinctly minor figure in American literature . . . most of (whose) work now seems irretrievably dated.” Boo.
MARCH 20
Edith Freund publishes ”Chicago Girls,” a first novel set during the naughty `90s, when Chicago was preparing for its World Columbian Exposition. The timing couldn`t have been better, what with the city making plans for a World`s Fair in 1992. But within a few months, Freund`s nostalgia seems more bitter than sweet as the fair collapses under the burden of political and economic realities.
APRIL 15
Richard Nixon`s memoir, ”No More Vietnams,” contains one major revelation: The former president claims that he–and he alone–won the Vietnam War. ”This,” observes one reviewer, ”is more than somewhat preposterous.” Or, as another critic remarks, Nixon may not be a crook, but he`s no historian either.
APRIL 24
Studs Terkel wins a Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for ”The Good War: An Oral History of World War II.” Celebrating over a bottle of scotch, Terkel is asked about the significance of the award. ”It makes me
respectable,” he says.
APRIL 30
On the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, more than a dozen books are published, including a memoir by a Viet Cong officer, a narrative history of the war and a study of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder among veterans. Coming from so many diverse sources, there is little unanimity of opinion, to nobody`s surprise. But the authors do reach a consensus on one point: Richard Nixon did not win the war. Nor did anybody else on our side.
JUNE 10
Saul Bellow observes his 70th birthday with a minimum of civic fuss, which is, after all, why he chooses to live in this somber city. A number of friends and admirers do take note of the occasion in a birthday issue of the Saul Bellow Journal, with one contributor noting that our Nobel laureate snores.
JUNE 24
Ernest Hemingway`s ”The Dangerous Summer,” a condensation of a 120,000- word Life magazine account of his travels on Spanish bullfighting circuits, is published to resounding critical and commercial oles, becoming a surprise best seller. By the end of the year, Hemingway`s publisher, Scribners, exhumes another giant manuscript, ”The Garden of Eden,” a novel about sexual perversity in France, which it will publish, after considerable pruning, in
`86.
JULY 17
The 2 millionth copy of ”Iacocca”–the autobiography of Lee Iacocca, chief exec of Chrysler motors–comes off the press, putting it in the stratosphere with such all-time best sellers as ”Gone with the Wind” and
”Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” The loudest cheers are heard from the corporate offices of Bantam Books, the paperback giant that goes on to rack up impressive sales with hard-cover biographies of two other high-profile figures, Chuck Yeager and Geraldine Ferraro.
AUG. 6
David A. Stockman, President Reagan`s former budget chief, signs a book contract for more than $2 million, the largest advance paid to a public official for his memoirs. Two days later, Hugh Hefner sells the rights to his life story for considerably less, $1 million, which seems to indicate that, as a spectator sport, Reaganomics takes precedence over sex. Hef says he expects the book to be ”revelatory and therapeutic,” not to mention highly profitable.
SEPT. 5
Garrison Keillor, a cult figure on National Public Radio for his affectionately satirical ”Prairie Home Companion” program, makes a notable crossover into hard-cover fiction with his novel, ”Lake Wobegon Days,” based on humorous material from the program. By the end of the year, there are more than a million copies of the novel in print–offering a ray of hope, however faint and temporary, for those who are beginning to believe that you have be an auto executive, a test pilot or a sybaritic magazine publisher to succeed in the author business.
SEPT. 25
Novelist Richard Stern publishes a fanciful profile of TV newscaster Deborah Norville in Chicago magazine, which brings a scathing feminist response for the article`s alleged sexism. Stern pleads innocent, saying that because of their myopic feminism, his critics have missed the irony and mocking humor of his story.
OCT. 1
E.B. White, the humorist, New Yorker essayist and author of such children`s classics as ”Charlotte`s Web” and ”Stuart Little,” dies at 86 of Alzheimer`s disease. White was an inspiration to many writers for his advocacy of a clear, direct prose style. Among the other authors on the 1985 obituary list are Robert Graves, Philip Larkin, Fernand Braudel, Italo Calvino, Shiva Naipaul, Alfred Hayes, Taylor Caldwell, Robert Nathan and Theodore Sturgeon.
OCT. 3
In an auction with six other publishers, Bantam wins the rights to Sally Beauman`s first novel, ”Destiny,” for $1 million, reputedly a new high for a writer without a track record (which makes the $350,000 Random House paid another first novelist, Karleen Koen, a few weeks earlier, seem like jitney fare). Bantam editorial director Stephen Rubin describes Beauman`s epic, set in Mississippi, London and Paris, as ”mainstream commercial . . . but written at a high level.”
OCT. 16
With much less fanfare, Chicago-based Encyclopaedia Britannica reaches a milestone by posting $1 billion in sales since 1973. In that time, it has sold nearly 1 million sets of its 15th edition. That`s 30 million volumes in all, or, as EB puts it, encyclopaedically, ”enough to supply every man, woman and child in the states of Florida and New York with a volume.”
OCT. 17
Following its recent custom, the Nobel committee chooses an obscure author for the international prize: avant-garde French novelist Claude Simon, who denies reports that his work is mystifying, saying: ”There are no great thoughts, no great metaphysical arguments in my books.” The same claim might be more credibly made by the winner of a home-grown literary prize, Sidney Sheldon. A few weeks after the Nobel is announced, Sheldon receives the Freedom to Read Award, given by the Friends of the Chicago Public Library, for his battle against censorship.
NOV. 27
Edmund Morris, whose biography of Teddy Roosevelt won a 1980 Pulitzer Prize, gets a $3 million advance for a biography of President Reagan, which won`t be delivered to the publisher (Random House) until 1991. In diligently covering ”history as it occurs,” Morris says he will not only have access to presidential meetings and diaries, he is thinking about moving into the White House.
NOV. 30
Reports of Mark Twain`s death, it turns out, are still greatly exaggerated. On the 150th anniversary of his birth, Twain continues to be as popular as ever with readers–and with book-banners, who maintain that ”The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is a racist book, and a dirty one besides. Unconvinced, the University of California Press publishes not one but two new editions of ”Huckleberry Finn,” on the centennial of its original appearance.
DEC. 6
”The Mammoth Hunters,” the third in Jean M. Auel`s series of ”Earth`s Children” novels, comes lumbering out of the gate with a mammoth first printing–one million copies, which the publisher (Crown) claims to be the highest in the history of hard-cover fiction. In the process, Auel`s book beats, by 250,000 copies, the previous fiction champ, James Michener`s
”Texas,” which was published two months earlier. On this all too typical note, the year comes to a mercenary–and perhaps merciful–end.
