Word: reader
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...recurrent presence in these stories, both as an elemental force" that frees characters from land-based obligations and, more insistently, as a lens on another world. In The Adventure of a Reader, the hero compares a printed page to the plane of water "that separates us from that blue-and-green world, rifts as far as the eye can see, expanses of fine, ribbed sand, creatures half animal and half vegetable...
...shame, too, because Adams has taken the sort of thing Rona Jaffe '51 and Faye Levine '65 do, and done it better. Three of the four main characters, while stereotypes simply because they are exactly what we have come to expect from Radcliffe, do engage the reader for a while; will they follow formula or break out of the mold? If they become social deviants, will it be in a typical fashion or by doing something genuinely unacceptable? The rigid social structure of the old Radcliffe was still in place when Adams and her characters attended the school-pincurls...
...gets worse, far worse. Peg is big and jolly, and so blatantly maternal that any semi-conscious reader can see her realization that she is a lesbian coming years before she or her family does. Cathy, the only one of the four main characters who inspires not even the slightest bit of interest, turns out so typically that you can probably call it from right where you're sitting. She's a Catholic from Philadelphia, and her first serious boyfriend is a social outcast who sweeps her off her feet and then unaccountably dumps her--but then, she didn...
Relieved of the obligation of looking at these photographs, the reader can smartly proceed to skip Eruntics, the monumental work of one Reginald Gulliver. He, as a few people will some day know and then immediately forget, is the one who teaches bacteria to communicate in English. An introduction to his accomplishment more than suffices: "The description of experiments which occupies later chapters of Eruntics is unbelievably boring by virtue of its pedantry, prolixity, and continued interlarding of the text with photograms, tables, and graphs which make it difficult to digest." A five-volume History of Bitic Literature is conveniently...
...case against interviews with writers is historic: they exploit personalities, expose their subjects in verbal undress, without their styles hitched up, and they traffic in anecdote and gossip. This is also the case in favor of such interviews. And why not? How else would a faithful reader learn- as he does in Writers at Work-that Elizabeth Bishop, while a student at Vassar, ate from a bedside pot of Roquefort cheese at night to stimulate dreams for her notebooks, and once spent a night in a tree outside her dormitory? Or know about Carson McCullers' visiting Elizabeth Bowen...