Word: brads
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...your chest-Be hostile! Talk back to Brad Crandall, say the ads. And when they talk to Brad, people sometimes get so excited that they produce dialogue of spectacular improbability. "My father," shouted one man last week, "was not a black woman." No one could rebut that. But WNBC's Brad Crandall is ready to debate just about everything else on his nightly radio show. Anyone can call him up and exchange opinions on everything from civil rights to seat belts...
...until midnight for a month. He got the job because WNBC was flopping on the bottom of the New York radio ratings barrel. Noting that RKO's WOR had long held top position by putting on talk shows around the clock, WNBC decided to do the same-with Brad Crandall doing most of the talking...
...sometimes sounds like a pontifex maximus, he generally talks neither down nor with false humility. On a typical evening last week, a caller asked Brad's views on states' rights. "A valid issue 10% of the time," he answered. "A smoke screen the rest of the time." Another caller said he was worried by the thought of Unidentified Flying Objects darting about in the atmosphere...
...mistress called Prudence Brandowitz once confided to his hairy armpit a distaste for "Southern vulgarity." The effects upon him were startling. "My heart knobbed up and started a wild swing," Brad reminisces. "It was as though all those hairy flea-bit, iron-rumped and narrow-assed, whooping and caterwauling, doom-bit bastards on hammer-headed nags, gaunt as starvation, who rode with Gin'l Forrest had broke loose and there was fire, rape and unmitigated disaster all the way to the Canadian border." In short, fastidious Prudence...
...pity of it is that for all its melodramatic hurly-burly and all the idiomatic rhetoric, a serious and moving novel has not been created. At the book's end, Brad Tolliver is left in a convulsion of romantic agony, thinking, in the usual important italics, "There is no country but the heart." This seems to be a mere cliché until examination proves it something less than that-an untruth. Surely if Flood has any solid theme, it is that the physical shape of a loved object-in this case, Fiddlersburg-is important, that its loss is irrevocable...