Expensive Habits_图书大全
Expensive Habits
ISBN: 9780671506254
定价: 180.00
内容简介
Maureen Howard has created her grandest heroine
yet in Expensive Habits, a dazzling, big American
novel. "So, let the story begin with potatoes," says
Margaret Flood, finding the humble beginning of her
life, a life that includes her celebrated career as
writer, two ill-fated marriages and the ample slice of
history she has witnessed, from McCarthy s witc, h
hunts in the Fifties to the Watergate bust.You will not
forget Maggie Flood once you listen to her wickedly
funny tales. She is an enchantress, a clever scold, a
feisty, formidable woman--a love.
Struck down in mid-story with a heart condition.
Margaret is defiant: she has always controlled the
plot. With the clock ticking against her, she finally
attempts to review her life, for herself and those she
has loved--to eaptare the lost truth for Jack Flood,
her first husband, an ambitious cardiovascular sur-
geon with a taste for female flesh; fur Bayard Strong,
her snn, a gified d innocent who lovingly protects his
parents from their failures. But expensive habits are a
way of life for all the men and wumen in this masterful
novel, and Margaret Flood is still holding the cards.
For Pinkham Strong, her greatest passion--society
boy, adventarer--who found his role as an elegant
radical in the Sixties, she finds no forgiveness. In
remarkably urgent prose, Maureen Howard reveals
the tragic moment when the story is taken from her
and the debts called in.
In Expensive tfabits the great figures of Margaret s
fashionable scene, literary and political, are rendered
as witty, unholy portraits: Sol, her Hollywood lover,
the producer with a glitzy talent for simulating reality;
the burnt-out, carefully shopworn editor. Philo
Pierce; and a group of aged communists, heroic
types, who live in bourgeois splendor. In high style,
Maurccn Howard s virtuosity encompasses all of Mar-
garet s false moves--her trendy scripts and
trendy novels--and asks some important questions.
What is left to value in a world where our deepest
feelings are grist for the mill, and what of political
commitment in a country that so desperatelywants to
be entertained? For what price does Margaret Flood
trade private life for the public name?
With this extraordinary novel, Mauryeen Howard
stakes out, more compellingly than ever before, her
position in the front ranks of contemporary writers of
fiction. Her inventive and powerful voice blends trag-
edy with farcical incident to present Margaret Flood s
redemption from spiritual waste.
