Word: reader
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...wedlock. He wants to divorce Ruth and make an honest woman of Sally. He agonizes over his children. He revels in sweet pain and postures about the divided allegiances that plague him. He also collects locks of Sally's hair. In short, Jerry strikes the reader as a twerp of twerps. At their trysts the two revert to sheer teen-agery, '50s style. They find themselves ravished by love lyrics that come over the radio. They exchange mysterious, monosyllabic endearments. "Hey." "Hi." Jerry gives up smoking. Updike reports: "He wanted his kisses to taste clean." Cupid...
...view of the book's crisis: "An innocent man and a greedy woman had fornicated and Ruth could not endorse the illusions that made it seem more than that. They were exaggerators, both of them." The reader agrees, and is inclined to root for Ruth who wants to save her marriage. He is also inclined to reflect on what appear to be similar- ities between Jerry and Updike himself: that galloping insomnia, for instance. Like Updike's own recently divorced wife, Ruth is a Unitarian minister's daughter. Like Updike and his wife, Ruth and Richard once...
...that matter, so do the horrors. They are too much of a bad thing. The reader soon longs for Newman to interrupt with some sustained comment and analysis. What generalizations he does provide are unexceptionable but also unexceptional ("We are all safer when language is specific. It improves our chances of knowing what is going on"). In his 207 pages, there is scarcely as much intellectual substance as George Orwell offers in the 15 pages of his celebrated 1946 essay Politics and the English Language...
This is a polemic, although the author does not alert the reader to the argument on the other side. His approach leads to a hermetic absorption with words as objects rather than signs pointing outward-precisely the premise that makes so much "experimental" writing so ghastly and unreadable. Gass also passes off a tautology as profundity: "I am firmly of the opinion that people who can't speak have nothing to say." This is both true and too cute by half; it nar- rows human awareness to the single focus of language, denies the very variety of living that...
...honest recognition of minority students as people, as individuals who carry and cope with the double responsibility to self and to race and/or culture. Even the term, "minority student," tends to be lumped with such phrases as "disadvantaged," "culturally deprived," "low testers," "intellectually inferior, "inherited insufficiencies." The reader is familiar with the dictionary of poverty. In fact, the concept of the "minority students" has been so tainted with the publicity about and the generic but false beliefs of minority students' educational deprivation and intellectual inferiority that the person behind this label is faced with one of the most difficult battles...