Word: albert
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Albert is forever coaxing the world to yield up more elegant significances, secretly glowing metaphysics. He goes for a tangerine at night: "Opening the refrigerator he is dazzled by the burst of light, finding it comparable to the effulgence which in the Rembrandt print reveals the stirring Lazarus, floods Christ's robes. In that case, the light presumably emanates from the Lord instead of coming from behind the No-Cal cream soda, but the principle is the same." Albert peers into a dryer at the Laundromat: "Behind the glass door, clothes appear and reappear, seemingly striving with death-defying...
...claustrophobic tumble of his brain, the world has a habit of collapsing into melancholy. Poor overread Albert warns himself about Keats' "egotistical sublime." His rich interior is forever ababble with Kant and Schopenhauer and his own obsessive, bewildered mutterings. A distant descendant of Leopold Bloom, cousin to the anguished intellectual comics of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and even Woody Allen, Albert negotiates a shambling, rueful passage through his mid-40s. He has made Who's Who in America (a New York magazine writer and editor), but "lately he has the feeling that he is not so much pursuing...
Novelist Rogin is the managing editor of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, a magazine in which bright, brisk conflicts get resolved by the end of the fourth quarter. Albert's world is more bewildering, achingly inconclusive. He lives in a Greenwich Village brownstone, two flights up from lis "semi-ex-wife" Violet, who has resumed life with her first husband, a functioning dipso poet named Skippy Mountjoy. Albert drops by to walk their dachshund every day. His girlfriend is a youthful, frantically athletic woman whom he calls the Human Dynamo. She telephones lim at night from New Canaan, Conn., to wonder whether...
Rogin has arranged his novel as a dis orderly meditation wandering over six years of Albert's life. Tragedy (his step son's death by drowning) blows by with a sort of offhanded inevitability. The Dynamo moves from New Canaan to Fair Haven. But the action is entirely within the well-furnished brain of antic and sorrowing Albert. One day he tells his psychiatrist: "You know, Tolstoy said that playing the accordion diverts men from realizing the falsity of their goals." Replies Dr. Nederlander: "You want me to turn on the Yankee game...
...dance number called "Famous Feet." Tommy Tune, who brings an irrepressible humor to his choreography as well as dauntless invention, has devised a narrow, mirror-backed bridge span of a stage high above the stage proper. Only the legs and feet of the dancers (Niki Harris and Albert Stephenson) are visible. By their styles and their shoes, ye shall know them. Some feet! Fred and Ginger, naturally, as well as Garland, Chaplin, Dietrich and, believe it, Mickey and Minnie...