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Title: expert in academia, novitiate in tales of real people
Review: There are very few Lisa Birnbachs, fewer still good anecdotalists,and virtually no readable satirists. Inappropriate displays of fragmentary erudition do not make a novelist-merely a candidate for more training in the art & craft of writing. This writer NEEDS an original or novel idea . Fragments picked from here and there can never make a page of writing--perhaps a vertiginous patchwork quilt which causes nausea, but never pleasure. Living in Washington is not the same for inspiration as La Place des Voges or chez une soiree of the Guermantes.
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