Word: apergus
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...fiction, she proved something of a middling radical. Speedboat (1976) blurred traditional narrative and character development with the authority of a French antinovel. But the book avoided the rigid aesthetic of a Robbe-Grillet with choice bits of old-fashioned storytelling. Anecdotes, conversations and apergus were presented as a highly refined traffic din emanating from cultural Manhattan. The selected fragments added up to a lasting impression of an oddly provincial city of small talk in narrow brownstones and desperate solipsisms on the even narrower couches of psychotherapists...
...text has some virtues, some manically funny apergus, such as the glimpse of reverent Yalies hand-washing the baby's diapers to pay for the pair of Mies Barcelona chairs, those comfortless icons of secular progress. But its flaw, apart from Wolfe's shaky grasp of architectural history, is that he looks with his ears. Architects tend to write manifestos when they are not being asked to build. Given the choice between what architects wrote about architecture, and what they actually built, Wolfe believes the words every time. This leads him into some strange fluffs, like his mistaken...
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