Word: connoisseurs
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Readers who enjoyed John Gregory Dunne's True Confessions (1977) know the author as a connoisseur of the raffish, the macabre and the sleazy. They also know how deftly Dunne snatches sentiment from the jaws of cynicism, and how he can cut a plot line with fine malice. But in his new novel, Dutch Shea, Jr., sentiment is savagely chewed and the free association of memory is substituted for plot...
Despite the dilution, so suggestive is coke's mystique, and so eager are people to believe in its efficacy, that buyers usually feel that they get high on it anyway. As a Manhattan coke connoisseur puts it, "Anyone who puts out a hundred bucks for a gram figures it has to be good...
Author Barry Hannah, 38, is also a connoisseur of the rundown, the tacky, the disreputable. Observes one wastrel: "My pappy's from Mississippi. He ain't worth nothing, but there he is." Pretty much the same thing can be said about Ray himself. Hannah is talented enough to make his hero's uninhibited meanness sympathetic and humorous. Ray says things that most people only think, at low moments: "I get tired of people. All of them driving around in their cars, eating, having to be." But unrelieved rascality can grow boring, and this short novel ends...
...backdrop of this psychodrama is irresistible to stay-at-homes. A bald eagle nests on the island; wolves come close enough to the house to be easily seen in the moonlight. Though she went off looking for permanence, Arthur discovers that she is a connoisseur of flux. The lake evokes her keenest descriptions: during a storm "the water was stirred every few minutes by a gigantic sweep like the slap of a hand." On a sunny day "the lake is ocean blue, throwing back the face of the sky and then catching it again...
...Dorms ready for occupancy, says the brochure; dorms open, says the connoisseur. Arrive ready for occupancy, invasion and incursion at 6:30 a.m. Grab the keys to the entryway and room. Run (repeat: run) upstairs, quickly unlock the door, and throw your belongings on the bed of the suite's only single. Be sure to be nonchalant, however, when your roommate ambles in ten minutes later. You'll be spending a lot of time with that person this year. Tell your first fib, something like, "Well, I got in at three in the morning and didn't have a place...