Word: reader
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Caroming between gloom and euphoria, the reader of such conflicting reports can hardly be blamed for a queasy feeling of futurist shock. For prophecy is no longer confined to science fiction or Jeane Dixon. It is in the laboratories, think tanks, universities - everywhere. A.D. 2000 has now replaced 1984 as the favorite year for speculation. At least 400 colleges are offering futurist courses; the World Future Society claims 18,000 members, holds international conferences and produces a semimonthly journal, The Futurist, to ponder new times...
...might have been able to go somewhere with this plot, but Agnew simply does not know where to start. Nothing happens for the first two hundred pages. Agnew introduces his characters with an almost Proustian verve for description, but his idea of expressing meaningful detail is to inform the reader every time a character shaves, or brushes his teeth. Then, when the action finally takes place--most of it in the final fifty pages--Agnew makes up for lost time and all hell breaks loose. Old friends become antagonists overnight; radical extremists blackmail high government officials in the Executive Office...
...Bettelheim's book; the very title The Uses of Enchantment suggests utility over literary delight, therapy before amusement. Deep within the volume are less convincing "proofs" of this attitude. The legends of Snow White, of Hansel and Gretel, of Goldilocks are parsed for every psychological nuance. Here the reader leaves the nursery for what Vladimir Nabokov calls "the fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents...
Such dogma tends to remind the reader of a remark attributed to the father of analysis: that while a cigar was a phallus it was also a cigar. The humor of Sneezy, Dopey and Doc, the excursions of Hansel cannot be reduced to Freudian simples. The wolf in Little Red Riding Hood is more than the "potentially destructive tendencies of the id"; he is a wolf as well. Of course a child walks in a giant's world. Of course boys and girls dream of transformations into wondrous and powerful creatures, i.e., adults. Of course the tears and truths...
Through this aperture into the occult, the reader views a tapestry as large and ornate as any to be found in recent poetry. Merrill's allusions are often recondite. But his loving attention to brilliant surfaces outdazzles difficulties. The Book of Ephraim crackles with...