Japanese Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata took 12 years to write his classic novel about a geisha, “Snow Country”; it’s taken Arthur Golden almost nine years to finish his MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA. Hey, this subject takes a lot of research. First-novelist Golden tracks the saga of Sayuri from the age of 9, when her father sold her into slavery, to her rise as supergeisha, her fall into wartime indigence and her rise again to wealth and happiness in America. Golden is being hailed for a great job of literary karaoke, capturing the voice and lore of an exotic and civilized profession. Hollywood is sniffing around.
THE DARK SIDE OF CAMELOT is not about an affair between King Arthur and Lancelot. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has been fly-swatting rumors about the revelations in his upcoming book on the Kennedys. No, said Hersh, I don’t write that Marilyn Monroe was killed because she was blackmailing JFK. But he has been mum on the rumor that the book details hush money paid out by JFK’s father, Joe, to buy the silence of various people about Kennedy ties to the Mafia. Whatever the book does say, Little, Brown reportedly thinks it’s worth $1 million and a first printing of 500,000. Where Hersh sees the Kennedys in a dark night, Ronald Steel plays a different nocture in his IN LOVE WITH NIGHT: THE AMERICAN ROMANCE WITH ROBERT KENNEDY. Simon & Schuster promises no scandal, instead trumpeting terms like “mythic. . .crusade. . .idealism.” With the Kennedys it’s either sinners or saints. If Ted Kennedy sat down and wrote the unflinching truth about the Kennedy constellation, it would be a great American book. But that would take a spiritual transformation of Augustinian magnitude.
Moving from America’s pseudoroyal family to the real British thing, THE ROYALS, Kitty Kelley, the Jack the Riper of biography (previous mutilations: Sinatra, Jackie O, Liz Taylor, Nancy Reagan), has apparently committed another celebicide. Her book is expected to say–no fooling–that the Queen Mother is illegitimate, that Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret are the products of artificial insemination, that Fergie underwent cocaine detox, and whatever else can earn back the $4.5 million Warner is said to have paid. With Britain’s stiff libel laws, the book won’t be published in the U.K., but it will be read. One London journalist wrote that when the book comes out in October, “thunderbolts will break about Windsor Castle.”
Don DeLillo (“White Noise,” “Libra”) will produce only the lightning bolts of brilliant writing. He breaks into the big money with about a million dollars from Scribners for UNDERWORLD. Paramount has grabbed the movie rights for up to another million. DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann are writers who flood the world with words, creating oceanic texts to inundate the disjunctions of the modern world. DeLillo’s 832-page novel takes off from the 1951 playoff game in which Bobby Thomson’s legendary home run enabled the New York Giants to steal the pennant from the Brooklyn Dodgers. Encompassing a half century of change from the cold war to the new world order, the book is DeLillo’s home-run swing to win the pennant in the American Novelist League. Salman Rushdie says “Underworld” will be the year’s best novel. And he’s a cricket fan.
