Word: reader
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...have already heard it twice before, in Portrait of a Presidency and Death of a President. In One Brief Shining Moment, a series of personal recollections of Kennedy, Manchester returns to tell the tale again. His latest work is an attempt to recreate the past, to transport the reader back through the misty timewarp of memory. "If I have been successful," writes Manchester in his preface, "you should feel not only that these events happened, but that they are happening as your eye roves down the page, and that you--not the author or any other source--are really there...
...From Harvard to Hyannis Port to the Oval Office, Manchester drops us right into the middle of the arena, whether it be the family football game or Kennedy's funeral procession, Manchester's main device is to remove any reference to his sources--obstacles which would ostensibly remind the reader that he's still here. Sometimes Manchester dons the traditional cloaks of anonimity ("The President told a friend..."; "The President said privately..."), but more common is his use of the second person: "As you alighted from the congressman-elect's convertible you thought that Hyannis Port must by an ideal...
...several tea rooms (all elbowing for preeminence, not unlike the seven Ray's Pizza in NYC). A year and a half ago, just before taking time off, I had pilgrimaged to this same tea room at the urging of a friend. On that visit, John, the tea leaf reader, greeted me with the warning, "I feel that you might leave this region. That would be a mistake, a big one. I see money problems in the next couple of months if you leave. It will be very hard. I feel you should stay here." Terrific, My lease expired...
...longer you sit there, the more pathetic and foolish the shop seems, and you with it. The plants and gaudy red flowers on all the tables are plastic. The eyes of the older woman reader, with heavy make-up, arched eyebrows, gypsy rings and long red dress, dart about like those of a nervous crank, making sure the other readers don't take her customers. She offers such wisdom as, "you have a dog who loves you very much [the man is blind and has a seeing-eye dog next to him]. I see a woman coming into your life...
...substantial novels made into movies these days? Perhaps because the printed page is a dominatrix of the imagination, demanding that the reader conjure up worlds from words, that he become a hard-working co-conspirator in the creative experience. Celluloid, by comparison, is a laissez-faire baby sitter. It asks only that the viewer believe what he sees, that he go with the flow of seductive images and return to intellectual infancy as a passive, pacified fun sucker. The young audience that makes hits these days out of laser shows and locker-room frolics seems bored with the notion that...