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novels.
    Age in year of publication: sixty-four.
     
     

T. Coraghessan Boyle 1948–
     
1995 The Tortilla Curtain
     
    T. Coraghessan Boyle is one of the funniest, sharpest, most original novelists in the United States now. He is interested in the advanced humour inherent in advanced capitalism; America is the vast, dark comedy to which he is wide awake.
    The Tortilla Curtain tells the story oftwo Californian families. The first, led by the nature-loving Delaney, is white and rich and less liberal as the days go by and illegal Mexicans haunt the horizon. The second family is Mexican and illegal and open to every possible calamity known to the human race – fire, flood, robbery, hunger, rape, poison, to name but a few. Delaney’s wife Kyra is one of the most vile people in contemporary literature, and as the book proceeds Delaney starts to join her.
    The plot may sound deterministic and crude, as chapters alternate between the ghastly rich and the simpatico poor, but the writing and pacing of the book are too clever for that, and the characters too deeply felt and carefully drawn. The book is, however, very political indeed, startlingly so in a time when hardly any American writing is political; it makes you loathe white middle-class Californians, and this must surely be a good thing.
    T. Coraghessan Boyle was born in Peekshill, New York, and is the son of Irish immigrants. His other novels include Water Music (1981), East is East (1990) and The Road to Wellville (1993).
    Age in year of publication: forty-seven.
     
     

Anita Brookner 1928–
     
1985 Family and Friends
     
    In this tart comedy of manners Anita Brookner uses family photographs – wedding photographs – to tell the story of the Dorns, a well-off London family with wistful echoes of a middle-European milieu left behind. There is the matriarch Sofka and her four children: Frederick, her pride and joy; Betty, the favourite daughter; Mimi, the gentle one; and Alfred, the sacrificial lamb. In their world of comfort and coffee, brandy and marzipan cake, an ‘air of family unity serves to disguise unforgivable facts’. Some of these are that Frederick and Betty – two of Brookner’s most artful monsters – are heartless and self-serving, manipulators of family arrangements which seem superficially innocent, but which flicker with unexplored deceits and vanities.
    Family and Friends includes some of Anita Brookner’s finest writing – and some of her most trenchant. Her fiction is noted for its subtlety and technical skill but this can be deceptive, and has indeed deceived the odd ghetto of English critics who greet her novels with delighted misunderstanding. Elsewhere it is recognized that, in ambush behind her classically beautiful prose, rooted in her territory of small lives, is a devilry that works on her stories like lemon zest. Family and Friends , in Alfred’s final revenge, provides a finale so delicate and precise that you can almost see the keen eye of the author slowly blinking at you.
    Anita Brookner, the daughter of Polish parents, was born and educated in London, where she lives. Her fourth novel, Hôtel du Lac , won the 1984 Booker Prize.
    Age in year of publication: fifty-seven.
     
     

Anthony Burgess 1917–1993
     
1980 Earthly Powers
     
    Anthony Burgess wrote a thousand words a day – journalism, reviews, criticism, autobiography, verse, short stories, novels. He never repeated himself. He wrote science fiction and a thriller, he wrote A Clockwork Orange (1962), he wrote novels about Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Beethoven, and many comic novels.
    His most ambitious novel and the work in which he combines his comic talent, his sense of history and his nose for a good story is Earthly Powers . It is narrated by one Kenneth Toomey, an octogenarian celebrity writer, a cross between Burgess himself, Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, a man capable of producing the following first sentence: ‘It was the afternoon of my