Word: clara
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...CLARA REEVE...
Other modes, indeed: card sharping? bunco artistry? Hargrave's mischievous novel Clara Reeve purports to be the memoir of a young Englishwoman from 1850, when she was six, through the years of a preposterous marriage in her early 20s. Many novels attempt to be what they are not-the log of a whaling voyage, the writhings of a student who murders an old pawnbroker-and thus all are stratagems of a kind. But Hargrave's, Moore's and Crichton's constructs are far more elaborate, since they soberly imitate the genteel literary conventions and taboos...
...here is Clara Reeve, a sober send-up of the Victorian three-decker, as ingenious as an embezzlement scheme -and incidentally an astringent comment on the predicament of being female. As a little girl, Clara is orphaned, and raised in the forbidding London home of a pious uncle. When she is so light-minded as to laugh aloud at the antics of a bird in the garden, he whips her neck with a watch chain. The child accurately notes that it was indeed the custom to birch girls on the bared portions of their anatomies, but adds that nevertheless...
...notorious "Doo Dah" gang, had arranged the party for the opening-night floor show starring his bride, a former Detroit showgirl named Boo Boo O'Hare. Boo Boo could warble like a thrush, it was said, and Valenti told one and all that she would be "the next Clara...
...layoffs spreads, teachers are becoming increasingly indignant. Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, predicts there will be "massive protests" if all the cuts go through, and thinks the Federal Government will have to provide enough money to bail out the big-city schools. In the Santa Clara Unified School District south of San Francisco, 60 teachers who have been laid off charge that administrators seem to be immune to hard times. Says Jim Hamm, president of the Santa Clara Federation of Teachers: "In the past five years, the administrative staff has steadily gone up, but they...