Word: boredoms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Boredom is not the only feeling Home inspires. Awe is another one. As writers go, Robinson is among the superpowered. She moves easily in and out of minds that to a lesser writer would be solid and opaque, evoking their smallest, most intricate emotions with master-level eloquence. But at heart, Home is Jack's book, or it should be, and therein lies the problem. He's charming enough--God knows what the Boughton family did for the 20 years he was gone, since he's the only one in the house who can make a proper joke. He just...
...writes: "I loved the law school classroom: the stripped-down nature of it, the high-wire act of standing in front of a room at the beginning of each class with just blackboard and chalk, the students taking measure of me, some intent or apprehensive, others demonstrative in their boredom, the tension broken by my first question - What's this case about? - and the hands tentatively rising, the initial responses and me pushing back against whatever arguments surfaced." Professor Obama is facing a classroom the size of America now. The question is whether he'll be able to bring...
Scenes of exquisite boredom at school, as the teachers drone on about such traditional crowd pleasers as the Smoot-Hawley tariff act. Scenes of exquisite calculation at home, as Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) fakes an illness that will spare his fine intelligence another assault by the proponents of useless information. Ferris is no ordinary truant. The point of his exercise is not to waste the day but to spend it wisely. Or wise-guyly. So he will spring his best girl (Mia Sara) from school. He will get his best friend (Alan Ruck, who is lovely as a boy struggling...
Blame the homecomings on boredom, nostalgia or an indomitable drive to compete ("I got the itch," Favre reportedly told teammate Al Harris). But not all comebacks are success stories. Just ask Bjorn Borg, who left tennis in 1983 and un-retired in 1991, wooden racquet in hand. He didn't win a single match that year...
...point of How Fiction Works is supposed to be Wood's theory of the novel. And yes, we dutifully make the rounds of narration, dialogue and so on, topics that inspire in even the most passionate reader a special, pure kind of boredom. But as Wood himself observes, "The novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it." The novel is corrosive to systematic thought--whatever is good about it is precisely that increment that resists theorization. The great pleasure of Wood's book lies in the examples, not the points they...