Word: alther
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ORIGINAL SINS by Lisa Alther; Knopf; 592 pages...
...critical and commercial acclaim that greeted Kinflicks (1976) subjected Novelist Lisa Alther, 36, to just that question. The answer: She does pretty much the same thing over again, except that she does more of it and better. Kinflicks followed a single heroine from her Tennessee upbringing through a series of wacky encounters up North with the countercultures of the '60s. Original Sins quintuples its predecessor, offering five main characters, all Southerners, who try to grow up in a region and a country that are changing even faster than they...
With commendable speed and economy, Alther divides these five young people into the three who will leave home and the two who must stay. After much comic fumbling and steamy negotiating, Jed takes Sally's virginity. She responds like any well-brought-up Southern girl in the early '60s: "She clung to his hand, seeking from his fingertips assurance that he still respected her, would protect her reputation, would eventually marry her, and would love her forever. That didn't seem like too much to ask." When her pregnancy finally occurs, Sally and Jed marry and concoct...
...cuts back and forth between the adventures and peregrinations of her characters, Alther constructs a broad social portrait of nearly two decades of American life. She covers civil rights, Viet Nam, women's lib, the sexual revolution, radical politics and back-to-earth movements. Raised in the comfortable stasis of a small Southern town, Alther's young people are woefully and often hilariously unprepared for what life in the '60s and early '70s throws their way. What is more, the tight little community they grew up in is being rattled into unrecognizability. Outside organizers have installed...
...Kinflicks, Alther...