000			01952pam a2200205 4500
999			_c3720 _d3720
001			524158
008			820916s1973 nyu 000 1 eng
010			_a72012856
035			_a0068-89860
082			_a813.52
090			_aPS3537.H384 _bE8
100	1		_aShaw, Irwin, _d1913-1984
245	1	0	_aEvening in Byzantium
250			_a1st ed
260			_aNew York, _bDelacorte Press _c[1973]
300			_a368 p. _c23 cm
520			_aWhatever else -- and it's a very big else -- few writers can upstage Irwin Shaw when it comes to the shiny skills he applies to telling a seductive story well. In the half-light of Byzantium which in this case is Cannes where the air is thick with diminishment and failure. Not only the film industry's but also the once exceptional talent of Jesse Craig, an older lion and producer, who has been drinking too much and copping out on the demands of the IRS, his broker, his cunning and competitive wife whom he's now divorcing, as well as his decision to get back in the action with another vehicle. Perhaps it might be his own script which he has written pseudonymously. At 48 Jesse, however emotionally insolvent, has lost none of his powerful personal attraction -- whether for Constance, perhaps the best of many young women he's ever had who's in Paris, or for Gail, a young interviewer thinking of doing a piece on him -- ""The Once and Future Has-Been."" And with one of his daughter's arrivals his time and hands are even fuller before he goes back to New York, to the massive hemorrhage he barely survives, and to that last death-directed option. Shaw has managed to invest all this middle-aged wine and roses with a kind of allure and regret so that even though it's destined for the marketplace a man like Jesse Craig has turned his back on, you respect it for what it is rather than what it once might have been. Plush loge seat entertainment.
650			_aByzantium _vRoman _xHistory
942			_2ddc _cBK