Tully’s latest attempt to salvage Cloud fails: The incorrigible, now geriatric hippie absconds once more. In an improbable twist, Tully invites Kate and Marah to resolve their differences on her show, only to blindside Kate by accusing her, on live TV, of overprotecting Marah.

But Kate’s buttons are fully depressed by pitched battles over slutwear and curfews with teenaged Marah, who idolizes her godmother Tully. She hires Johnny, which spells riches for him and Kate. Kate is content as a stay-at-home mom, but frets about being Johnny’s second choice and about her unrealized writing ambitions. Johnny and Kate had started an affair once Tully moved to Manhattan, and when Kate gets pregnant with daughter Marah, they marry. When Tully lands a reporting job with a Today-like show, her career shifts into hyperdrive. Expecting rejection, Kate keeps her infatuation with Johnny secret. Meanwhile a love triangle blooms at KCPO: Hard-bitten, irresistibly handsome, former war correspondent Johnny is clearly smitten with Tully. Kate no longer wishes to follow Tully into broadcasting and is more drawn to fiction writing, but she hesitates to tell her overbearing friend. Tully lands an internship at KCPO-TV in Seattle and finagles a producing job for Kate. Tully has a life goal for them both: They will become network TV anchorwomen. In college, “TullyandKate” pledge the same sorority and major in communications. Tully takes refuge with the family of her “best friend forever,” Kate Mularkey, who compares herself unfavorably with Tully, in regards to looks and charisma. Tallulah “Tully” Hart, father unknown, is the daughter of a hippie, Cloud, who makes only intermittent appearances in her life. Lifelong, conflicted friendship of two women is the premise of Hannah’s maudlin latest ( Magic Hour, 2006, etc.), again set in Washington State. A strange and arresting story (Malamud has been a contributor to Commentary Partisan Review etc.) which men- even those who never get further than the newspaper- should enjoy. The only one who might have saved him is Iris, but he destroys her with a ard hit ball-aimed at the dwarf. But he seems doomed to estruction and is victimized by a merciless sports writer, a sanctimonious but evil judge who owns the club, a foul-mouthed dwarf, and a woman who is in love with his dead predecessor. At 34 he returns to the mound and makes a meteorical rise to the top. 22- loaded with silver bullets- his career is stopped before it starts. Succumbing to the wiles of Harriet Bird, a dangerous paranoid who shoots athletes with. The protagonist is Roy Hobbs, a 'natural' all player, first seen on a train heading for Chicago and a tryout at the age of 19. A highly original, tightly written novel of America's national sport and its periphery of fanatics, which in its fantastic invention of character and exploit assumes the proportions of the fabulous impossible.

The Natural by Bernard Malamud