Word: readerly
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...Charlie Brown was something new in comics: a real person, with a real psyche and real problems. The reader knew him, knew his fears, sympathized with his sense of inferiority and alienation. When Charlie Brown first confessed, "I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel," he was speaking for people everywhere in Eisenhower's America, especially for a generation of solemn, precociously cynical college students, who "inhabited a shadow area within the culture," the writer Frank Conroy recalled. They were the last generation to grow up, as Schulz had, without television, and they read Charlie Brown...
...chasms; they have altered publishing industries; they have even spurred censorship moves by some religious fundamentalists. But any assessment of her extraordinary impact should focus principally on the private transaction, as old as storytelling, between the speaker and the listener or, a more recent innovation, the writer and the reader...
...lovely voice, she seems altogether too poised and polished (not to mention too pretty) from the outset. Her desire for Rochester remains something we must take on faith, and her character, for all the gothic doings around her, seems to change little from beginning to end. And that, gentle reader, is something Jane Eyre cannot do without...
From this point on, Wilson's novel careers along on two tracks--the present investigation in Lisbon and past Nazi activities in Portugal--that slowly but inexorably converge. Inspector Coelho, of course, knows nothing about Klaus Felsen or his murky role on behalf of the Nazis, so the reader is always several steps ahead of the fictional detective. But they are only baby steps, because the connection between Felsen's story and the murder of Catarina Oliveira remains tantalizingly unclear for much of the novel...
...assertion that Greenspan sometimes literally gets a pain in the stomach as an early warning to problems not yet evident--"the body knowing something before the head"--is priceless. Fed watchers will want to read this book, as will the curious drawn to Greenspan's celebrity. For the average reader, though, there's less to get excited about...