Word: adler
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TOWARD A RADICAL MIDDLE by Renata Adler. 259 pages. Random House...
...Renata Adler is a Third Journalist. "I guess I am part of an age group [she is 32] that, through being skipped, through never having had a generational voice, was forced into the broadest possible America," she writes. "In a way, in culture and in politics, we are the last custodians of language-because of the books we read and because history, in our time, has wrung so many changes on the meaning of terms and we, having never generationally perpetrated anything, have no commitment to any distortion of them...
...apologia for the Silent Generation's chill neutralities. But George Orwell-another Third Journalist-would have understood that her commitment is a virtuous aversion to political language "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Like Orwell, Adler refuses the facile role of advocate or judge. In the trial of history she is simply a friend of the court. Luck and journalistic instinct informed her of tendencies just before they became movements. She was with Martin Luther King in Selma and Stokely Carmichael in Mississippi...
...sight of blood (from a razor slash on one of their wrists), four young men draw numbers from a hat and seemingly in jest agree to kill themselves in order, without revealing the pact or the motive. The four are loners, dependent upon each other in tangled psychological ways. Adler is a fat, ugly and lonely neuter from the Ozarks, who cannot reconcile his hillbilly background with his aspirations in botany and his love of dance and literature. Pless, a young psychologist whose feelings have been frozen since his father's death in a foolish flying accident, and Stoker...
...prime apostle of self-destruction in the group is Clive, a mathematician and galloping fantasist. Deserted by his family and raised in the ghetto, he seems demoniacally set on the destruction of the others. After Stoker presumably jumps off a building and Adler drowns himself in a greenhouse fish tank, Stoker's father-a square but sympathetically drawn colonel-sets out to unravel the mystery and discovers that suicide has turned into murder...