Word: magician
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Thrill as you spot Claudia Schiffer and her favorite magician at a chic party. Quiver at Lauren Bacall's nasty send-up of Diana Vreeland. Gasp at Cher's cocktail-party faux pas--a dead-serious tirade on the victimization of women through fashion. But Cher, the best thing to happen to chain links since the fence, can only briefly splash reality in the face of Altman's flimsy show...
Seinfeld's book is pretty funny, if you can keep his stand-up delivery in your head. Here he is on magicians: "What is the point of the magician? He comes on, he fools you, you feel stupid, show's over ... It's like, 'Here's a quarter. Now it's gone. You're a jerk."' And on people picking up dog poop: "If aliens are watching this through telescopes, they're going to think the dogs are the leaders of the planet. If you see two life forms, one of them's making a poop, the other...
...uncertain what they were fighting for. "The jungles stood dark and unyielding. The corpses gaped. The war itself was a mystery. Nobody knew what it was about, or why they were there, or who started it, or who was winning, or how it might end." Wade is an amateur magician nicknamed "Sorcerer" by his unit, and Vietnam becomes a place where he tries to make reality go away; it is a perfect training ground for the subterfuge and surveillance tricks people also use in love...
Expertly crosscut with Wade's life is a series of chapters called "Evidence" into which O'Brien throws psychological theories, passages of presidential biography, even accounts of battlefront atrocities in 1776. Here are quotations from Dostoyevsky and George Sand; selections from The Magician's Handbook and the Nuremberg Principles; an item about the 30,000 people who go missing every year. Thus, for example, as we travel deeper into Wade's battlefront memories, we are also given hard-and-fast, nonfiction testimony from the men who perpetrated the My Lai massacre. The "Evidence" chapters broaden the book's focus...
...Theroux updates the story of the prophet without honor in his own country. For prophet one could read writer, although the plot of this allusive entertainment gallops on its own. The style is picaresque, the message is salvation through health food, and the medium is Millroy, a road-show magician. Part Jesus, part Prospero, part yogi, he alone would make this a novel to conjure with. But Theroux adds another delight, Jilly Farina, a plucky adolescent with an artless narrative voice that, like Huckleberry Finn's, grabs and holds the reader's attention from the first page: "I had walked...