Word: boye
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Doctorow's artifacts have a familiar, wistful charm. Yet there is a curious defensiveness to his enterprise. Tone seems to have been substituted for emotion; artiness replaces vitality. Doctorow aims for a myth that would link a nation on the edge of war and a boy approaching adolescence, but he is too cautious with his material. He calls the book a novel, yet it has few of the elements usually associated with the form. A melancholy Edgar ticks off his experiences and observations; his mother, brother and aunt make brief personal appearances, while the father remains silent and remote. Even...
Being religious became a complicated and self-conscious business. Sheed recalls himself as a "Dead End Kid masquerading as an altar boy," and he is still at it. The more reverent he feels, the more irreverent the throwaway lines: "Even the Christian God tactfully divides his roles into three, and Frank did his damnedest to divide himself into at least two, but he lacked the infinite capacity." It can all get a little like Woody Allen playing Humphrey Bogart playing St. Augustine...
...kindness where such selfishness was unthinkable. Only when he was sent away to summer camp did he learn the awful truth about the rest of humanity. He has never recovered from the shock. "The counselors were very rough and occasionally sadistic. Once, when they were annoyed with a boy, they actually suggested that we beat him up! The whole world turned out to be like that camp. I still can't get over it, and writing, for me, is a way of trying to make sense of this world I'm surprised to find myself...
Privately, however, Louis was a womanizer and profligate who disastrously mismanaged his finances. A combination of pride and debt drove him to overstay his time in the ring. He lost his crown, became a referee and, briefly, an overweight professional wrestler. The battle between the Good Colored Boy and the resentful black man finally claimed its victim in the late '60s: he became a drug user and a blurting paranoid, convinced that murderers were stalking him. His last job before his death, in 1981, was as a "greeter" in a Las Vegas casino, where he signed autographs and played golf...
...city boy now, I once lived in a small town like Keillor's Lake Wobegon. If you look more closely at the local charismatic characters, they invariably are vicious bigots of the worst sort. Ned Gross Sarasota...