Playing with Eureka makes her melancholy, because “animals having fun can be a poignant spectacle — I suppose partly because it narrows the gap between us and them.”I can do without animals, most of the time, in novels. “When men appear in fiction now,” she writes, “it’s usually to be criticized or denounced for something. I meet the same paragon in book after book: high I.Q., great personality, firm moral purpose, dazzling wit. And the trick is to get across that she’s also very attractive without ever appearing to be somehow disrespecting her. Every novel is about aging, in a way, but Nunez is especially attuned to old age’s tender humiliations.

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Persons: Nunez, Bette Davis’s, Elizabeth Taylor, “, Virginia Woolf, Robert Hughes, ”, ” Nunez Organizations: Eureka