Word: communal
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...hoodlum, and then to a proper Boston women's college, "alma mater of vast battalions of female overachievers." When her prim devotion to the rationalism of Descartes collapses under the onslaught of Nietzsche, she drops out of school and into a lesbian affair with a leathery radical. A communal farm in Vermont claims Ginny next, and ultimately she sinks into a mindless marriage with the local snowmobile salesman. "The incidents in her life to date," Ginny fatuously decides, "resembled the Stations of the Cross more than anything else. If this was adulthood, the only improvement she could detect...
Cartoon Eccentrics. Novelist Alther, 31, draws this story in broad strokes, and as exuberant caricature Kinflicks is authentically inspired. The chapter on Ginny's communal life at the "Free Farmlet" is a wicked send-up of half-baked ideas and less well-prepared menus: "Dinner was a murky soup, filled with dark sodden clumps that looked like leaves from the bottom of a compost pile and that tasted like decomposing seaweed, and whole grain bread which you needed diamond-tipped teeth to chew." The novel teems with cartoon eccentrics mouthing balloonfuls of in flated nonsense...
...from one end of the building to the other. Russian apartments rarely have rooms this large because the country has a severe shortage of apartment space, and most families in Russia must place their children in generally small living rooms. Sometimes as many as four families will share a communal apartment...
...Figures. Beset by bad publicity, the Family has changed its name to the Church of Bible Understanding. No one knows how badly the group has been hurt by the attacks. Hoppes refuses to offer figures on the size of his flock, which includes residents in two communal houses and a fluid nonresident constituency. The Family, incorporated in 1974, has centers in 15 cities in eight states and, according to tax records, is headed by one Steward Traillis. Strangely, Hoppes claims he knows nothing about...
...nothing else, Pasqualini's captors insist on form. The inmates are kept near starvation and Pasqualini is horrified by the sight of his body in a mirror: His skin sags slack and bruised from contact with the communal plank bed. Nonetheless, when someone filches food, it cannot be from hunger, and he is "struggled." After three days of hooting, Pasqualini begs relief from the warder for everyone involved: "He admits he stole the bread. He was hungry. Isn't that enough? Do we have to make him say he is a dirty bourgeois because he was hungry?" The warder responds...