Word: clever
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...Indiana, where unemployment rates are around 10% and organized labor is strong, seemed like safe territory for Mondale; he wears the union label proudly and had won every previous primary state in which unemployment exceeded 10%. But Hart was finally able to reach into the blue-collar vote with clever ads that showed the Colorado Senator standing in working clothes outside a Youngstown, Ohio, factory, simply listening while the employees carved up Mondale. (First worker: "Union leadership may get our dues, but they don't get our hearts and minds." Second worker: "We lost with Mondale before...
Jennings, a top TV technician, is the compleat Yuppie ("clever, ironic, knowing, casual"), who views life as a videotape that needs editing; his boss, Talk-Show Host Billy Bell, sees it as a sequel to success. Bell has a few upscale plans of his own, among them bedding Kelly and beginning a political career. Only one problem nags: he does not know what politicians actually do. "They announced and attacked," writes Stevens. "He knew he would excel at that. But the rest...
...this medieval rhetoric gives the book a very clever structure. Louise Agar has spent her 26 failure-ridden years believing in the distant past. But now the "Lord and Lover" has become her employer Giles, instead of Christ. The Treatise fascinates Giles, too--not its ideas, but its language. After losing his sight and his first two wives. Giles hires Louise as a research assistant. His sorrows, his grouchy promiscuity, and his insecurities as a scholar leave him totally unprepared for her chaste, almost religious adoration. Unless he can deal with his miserable past, his budding love affair is doomed...
...this is very clever indeed, but goes nowhere toward making us feel what Giles felt. We are not able to picture the young Giles' cynicism at Cambridge from the narrator's sarcasm. Giles himself does not seem to have learned anything from his experience either. We long for anecdote, gasping with renewed interest when a crumb of plot is revealed. Wilson may have done this intentionally is make us feel how petty Giles Fox's life is. If so, the idea fails, because the result is overblown in its melodrama and moreover-tedious to read...
...clever characters in the book do not seem to balance with Giles' weighty gloom. It is hard to see the world, so to speak, through a blind man's eyes, and hard to make funny stories with happy endings out of morose ideas. Wise Virgin's cleverness just cannot buoy up its hero's dead weight...