Word: caleb
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...Caleb Sparrow, the hero of The Real World, is fresh out of college. Aside from his blue-blooded WASP background, Caleb is an unremarkable though sensitive young man who chooses a career in business because, as he explains, it seems romantic. Like so many members of his generation, Caleb senses inviting mystery in the world of pinstripe suits, technical jargon and commanding salaries. From afar, business appears to be a Darwinian struggle which rewards hard work and innovation...
...Caleb finds only disillusionment. Instead of encountering awe-inspiring captains of industry who have mastered the Protestant ethic of self-denial, he rubs shoulders with a bunch of cold, grubbing workaholics whose youthful grabs at promotions only mature into grabs for profit shares. Caleb's officemates crunch endless numbers, eye each other suspiciously and find their only communal identity worshipping the institution of the firm, and the sacred text of the annual report...
Somehow, though, Caleb muddles through. Despite incessantly questioning the meaning of it all, he completes his tasks with a modicum of efficiency, eventually gaining the approval of his superiors. But Caleb proves his immunity to the dehumanized values of his colleagues, when he falls madly in love with another employee. He chooses the primacy of his emotions over the robotic ambition of the business world and still survives as a sensitive, somewhat moody, young man in a corporate jungle. No mean feat...
...soulessness of the business world, but the book flounders on Knowlton's style. The stiff, third person narration employs an overbearing, occasionally patronizing tone, and suffers an annoying weakness for moralizing. Knowlton feels compelled to describe everything, thus cluttering the book with distracting details. The lengthy descriptions of Caleb's office, for example, should have been trimmed, and more attention given to the woefully rushed moments of tension between parents, lovers and bosses. But paradoxically, these laborious description also redeem the book and make it worth our attention, no matter how much stylistic damage they wreak. Though The Real World...
...learn from and of great paintings to see: such problems crimped the style of American painters or sent them, like Benjamin West (the Pennsylvania prodigy who became the second president of the Royal Academy) into European careers. Often the homespun Doric is better than the mail-order Ionic. George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) was no Poussin, but his groups of flatboatmen and river traders, leaning on crates with the air of Arcadian shepherds on a ruin whilst floating through the delicate silver haze of the Missouri, are often genuinely classical in their construction and repose...