Word: badly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Confession is a religious ritual and a literary device, a point that John Gregory Dunne has illustrated a number of times during his career as a U.S. journalist and novelist. For example, Vegas (1974) was an unflattering, candid account of a bad time in the author's life, an on-the-road book that played personal problems against the city that passes for Sodom, U.S.A...
Dunne is not naturally introspective, which may be bad news for the self- help set but is good news for readers who like snappy prose, to say nothing of snappishness. Dunne takes particular pleasure in knocking a great American unknockable from his hometown. Katharine Hepburn, he harps, "has always seemed to me all cheekbones and opinions, and none of the opinions has ever struck me as terribly original or terribly interesting, dependent as they are on a rather parochial Hartford definition of quality, as reinterpreted by five decades' worth of Studio unit publicists." Writing well, or at least trying...
...have sexual relations with "Aryans." In 1938 they were barred from practicing law or medicine or engaging in commerce. Along with such laws came all forms of discrimination -- signs barring them from grocery stores or drugstores or even whole towns -- and the constant threat of violence from any bad-tempered policeman, any unruly crowd...
...explain the military and its moral code to civilians. Such a voice was needed, for Viet Nam had created a barrier of estrangement between America's warrior class and the nation it serves. Tom Clancy's novels may be romanticized, but they have helped bring down this wall. Not bad for a small- town insurance man who thought he might try his hand at popular fiction...
...Meserve's military skills. The sergeant, who is not presented as a psychopath, and the other men are in a furor because a buddy has been killed in an ambush at a supposedly pacified village. Eriksson has an interesting speech in which he argues that the standard rationale for bad wartime behavior ("We might at any second be blown away") is exactly wrong. It is precisely because soldiers live inches from death that they should be "extra careful about what we do." The ending, in which Eriksson is awakened from his nightmare and, in effect, offered absolution by his trainmate...