Word: besottedness
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British comic novelist David Lodge has an endearing way of falling in love with his characters. In Nice Work (1991) he did a complete about-face, starting at a satirist's typical distance from his creations and finishing besotted with them. In Therapy (Viking; 321 pages; $22.95) he describes a...
The hero of his umbrous novel Novemberfest (Knopf; 386 pages; $24) is Glen Cady, a 50-year-old professor of German whose young wife Paige goes septic after he is rejected for tenure at his New Hampshire university. Glen is a decent fellow. He was an assembly-line worker in...
Surely no one opens The Interpretation of Dreams or Finnegans Wake in the hope of finding out exactly how Freud or Joyce dealt with that pesky, overbearing Shakespeare, particularly when Harold Bloom is ready with shorthand answers in The Western Canon. Why then, in this distraction-besotted time, read demanding...
In Matalin and Carville's book, as in real life, love keeps running far behind in the polls to the authors' passion for politics. The courtship of Mary and James (as they call themselves in the alternating monologues that are the book's format) is re-enacted in a single...
To Western eyes, the incendiary rhetoric and exuberant loutishness of this barnstorming Bonaparte have marked him as something of a buffoon. But to many Russians, Zhirinovsky offers a kind of touchstone for their deepest yearnings and frustrations. Less than three years after throwing off the communist yoke, Russia is ensnared...