Word: folderol
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...haired man with a boyish lack of pretension, graduated from Cambridge and had a pair of shows on the West End (London Assurance and The Cherry Orchard) by the time he was 23. He later spent five years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, developing a craft free of theatrical folderol. "You learned how to do Shakespeare with two tables and four chairs," he says. "Theater is not about illustrating, not about decorating. It's about building images from the inside out. That's frightening for actors. They can't blend into the scenery...
...stuff and wrote lovely, whimsical books about the rest: horse racing, trout fishing, quirky people who turn comical, not sodden, after a glass or two. Traveling Light is the title of one of his airy collections, and Barich seems as if he is about to continue with such beguiling folderol as he commences Big Dreams (Pantheon; 546 pages; $24), which records a long meander around California. Wistfully, lightly, the author recollects arriving in San Francisco as a 25-year-old in 1969. "In the Haight-Ashbury, I rented a cheap flat and furnished it a la mode with a massive...
...BOTTOM LINE: Folderol in the suburbs makes for a wildly implausible but highly moral tale...
...provoking a few harrumphs and a few more shrugs. Social posturing was taken more seriously in the '50s. Still, readers may feel that the hero's affronted psyche is a bit fragile. Novelist John O'Hara, who never went to college, used to be fascinated by this sort of folderol, and his friends joked about taking up a collection to send him to Princeton. Wolff is a skilled memoirist (The Duke of Deception) and novelist (Inklings), but maybe somebody should arrange a scholarship for him at Michigan State...