Word: conrades
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Hardly anybody noticed, but there was another presidential nominating convention last week. Arriving at Chicago's Conrad Hilton Hotel, about 700 American conservatives, many from the South and West, gathered to choose a ticket to take on Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in November...
Picking up the story after Conrad returns home, Ms. Guest deals with love and hate, forgiveness and the lack of it, madness and death-the themes appropriate to Greek tragedy. But she must deal with them in the terms of the well-made suburban novel. Panic equals the rattle of father's ice cube in one-too-many martinis. Despair equals the hundred small ways a Christmas Day falls apart, even when the keys to a new Le Mans for Conrad lie under the tree. Loneliness gets spelled out in the instructions on a frozen TV dinner...
...dialogue. Everything is buried under the ubiquitous wisecrack-the ironic putdowns and self-putdowns by which Americans play tag with their terror of failure. For failure is finally what Ordinary People is about. It may be Guest's ultimate irony that the older brother's drowning and Conrad's attempted suicide are only symbols for spiritual death-for a thousand subtle methods of neglect and undernourishment by means of which loved ones kill and are killed within the family circle...
...implies, too little trust of one's feelings. Thus the nearest to a savior the novel boasts is a flip-hip psychiatrist who eats doughnuts, drinks awful instant coffee and shares the floor with his patients because he can't afford a couch. His message to Conrad comes perilously close to the slogan of the '60s: LET IT ALL HANG OUT. Guest's alternate solution: the love of a good woman. Jeannine, who sings soprano in the choir to Conrad's tenor, almost backs into...
...fascinated by how individual members of any family handle stress, and she has learned to live through deep bouts of depression, counting on experience and commitment to carry her through. Says she: "That's what the young don't have. That's why a boy like Conrad is so vulnerable." As for guilt: "Everybody's got that...