Word: abed
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...time 15 eagles were perched in the Oval Office. Eagles on the rug, on the flagpoles, on the walls. Their population and prominence have been considerably reduced. The pervasive influence in the decor now is Abraham Lincoln. There is a statuette of young Abe standing serenely on a pedestal against the wall. Looking out over the office from the bookshelves is a bust of Lincoln sculpted by Leonard Volk in about 1880. This is the creased and concerned President who held the nation together. In the hall just outside the office is a larger bust of Lincoln, a melancholy visage...
...working for New York. "Clyde never lied to me then," says Hunter, "and he never lied to me now." Add to Kluttz the appeal of the Yankee heritage ("Just walking into Yankee Stadium, the chills run through you," says Hunter) and other assorted blandishments, including a letter from Mayor Abe Beame. No wonder Catfish was intent on trading Oakland's mod pastels for New York's dignified pin stripes...
...ABE'S THEME, in a word, is alienation. And because alienation has been cooked to a charred kernel, at least since Eliot's "unreal city" in The Wasteland, all that is left to do is pick it apart into ashes and let them scatter about in modernist prose, hoping that something new and different will happen. In Box Man every conceivable "new" technique is used--from describing the color of ink used in the marginalia, printed verbatim, to a fight between the box man and his fictitious alter-ego about who is the real narrator of the story...
...glimpse at the kind of muddling that goes into Abe's prose shows how much value he places in forcing the reader to unravel what should be simple statements...
...Abe has been compared with Laing in an interesting way; one of his great defenders in Japan said that "his attitude is similar to R.D. Laing's--that neurosis is not a disease, but a sign of intelligence being used." Perhaps, then, Abe has written an intelligent novel...