Word: reader
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...financial power. The novel is 897 pages long; it lacks drama and is built, like most lives, entirely of minutiae. It moves slowly and reaches no climax; yet at the end, when O'Hara has shown why his able, moneyed hero has lost the game of command, the reader feels strongly and unexpectedly moved...
Even while they were scrambling to catch up, Lacerda went spiraling on, flew to Manhattan for a Reader's Digest luncheon in his honor. "We shall never present a bill for the services Brazil rendered to all peoples in destroying a Communist occupation," he said of the revolution. However, it would be helpful if the U.S. would underwrite Brazil's currency by "the immediate creation of a fund to aid our effort against inflation," and also "would accept paying a better price for coffee." Suggestions like that store up political treasure back home for campaigning Carlos Lacerda...
...banker's office or Government agency, are run-of-the-table at Central Casting, a must at the hairdressers. General practitioners and advertising executives stick to the better-known periodicals; so, as a rule, do psychiatrists (though many patients, fearful of being caught engrossed in the Reader's Digest and branded a condensed personality, bring along a newspaper instead). Opticians invest in anything, so long as the print is good and dark; while pediatricians can get away with paper towels, stapled together, since anything not bound in cast iron will be in shreds before lunch time...
...When the reader meets Martha in the mid-1930s, she is a 15-year-old rationalist who contemptuously understands everything about her parents except how they got that way. Yet by her early 20s, she herself is, by what seems at the time her own choice, the wife of a standard-model civil servant and the mother of a conventional child. Although she has "views"-she disbelieves vaguely in the color bar-she is accepted placidly by colonial suburbia. Then she discovers that she feels as if she were going mad. Older wives smile kindly and say, Yes, that...
This unholy trinity constitutes the Nova Mob, a sort of celestial Cosa Nostra, and the book begins with "total disaster now on tracks" for earth, and "the whole planet absolutely flapping hysterical with panic." Any reader who hopes to learn in the end whether the Nova Mob outwits the efforts of Has san's Nova Police to save the world reveals a hidebound, unhip fixation with the old plotted fiction...