Word: nathanisms
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...Question of Chairs: The Challenge of American Education (CBS, 4-5 p.m.). The evolution of U.S. education discussed by Nathan M. Pusey, president of Harvard, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame, and Abram L. Sachar, president of Brandeis...
Toys from Anti-Santa. Nathan Bond, Author Wilson's protagonist, runs true to formula. In most disenchantment novels, the hero is a non-hero who attends an Ivy League college (Nathan goes to Yale), where he is traumatically snubbed because he lacks good looks or money, the two top things, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it. Lacking popularity, the non-hero decides to be different (Nathan wants to be an artist), but he invariably deserts his goal and runs rabbit-scared for life's lettuce (Nathan becomes a cartoonist and creates a Chaplinesque tramp called "Rollo the Magnificent...
...properly launched on his affluent career, otherwise known as the rat race, he must have a mate so that he can share his disenchantment. Early snapshots of his beloved are etched indelibly in the non-hero's mind, partly because he always lives his life flashbackwards. Nathan is forever recalling Amy arched against the sky on a diving board at poolside on her aunt's rambling estate. In disenchantment novels, these rambling estates are the toys of a gracious childhood soon to be whisked away by that legendary anti-Santa, the '29 crash. Nathan has his losses...
...Once Nathan's cartooning clicks, he and Amy move to Connecticut, where non-heroes almost always live. The couple has the standard nonheroic family, one boy, one girl. Nathan eventually makes $100,000 a year, above par for a non-hero, but the tax bite devours his bank balance. After a few years of this and nearly two decades of marriage, Nathan discovers, with the customary belated double take of the non-hero, that he does not know his wife, his children, or himself...
Vacuum Keening. At this point the non-hero always has two anodynes for his despair: 1) alcohol, 2) another woman. Author Wilson generously allows Nathan to sample both. Amy has an adulterous fling of her own after which the following dialogue ensues...