by Anne Beatie. It's 1980, and the New York press actually cares about the caustic remarks made by Harvard's pretty valedictorian. Jane promptly moves to Vermont to live off the land with her hippie boyfriend, until a trip to New York brings her within the gravitational pull of a highly opinionated yet cryptic and mysteriously wealthy writer named Neil who is nearly twice her age. Jane knows that Neil is a Svengali and willingly submits, only to discover that he's also a brazen liar. Nonetheless, they move into a Chelsea brownstone, where Jane voyeuristically enjoys downtown's cavalier exhibitionism. She has her moment of fame as the screenwriter for a documentary about runaways that wins an Academy Award, but bizarre circumstances conspire to leave her alone and bereft. This is a stark tale even for Beattie, the master of terseness and angst. But it is also an oddly beautiful distillation of a specific moment both in one fledgling writer's life and in New York's celebrity-driven culture, when creative forces gather like a held breath or the sea before a tsunami. --Booklist.
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