Word: conscious
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Flesh may be corruptible, and Author Elkin's spendthrift talent some times threatens to knock the bottom out of the word market entirely. But The Franchiser has what few novels have any more: the ability to astonish and delight and a totally conscious hero who proves that the unaudited life is not worth living...
...Conscious Hero. These are the chains that bind. To Flesh they give some kind of saving shape to the amorphous idea and energy of America. As he visits these franchises in his baby-blue Cadillac, he can hear them "speaking some Esperanto of simple need." His understanding of that need turns him into a poet of profit and loss. He knows, for example, how to turn a dollar from "the jetsam set," those people who lust for cut-rate, damaged merchandise: "Bang the canned goods, put little holes in the shirttails," he tells the manager of his Railroad Salvage store...
...wonderful centerpiece. The first main problem is that Thomas McGuane's celebrated writing is stinko. You can see almost every line spoken on the written page as soon as it's said; it doesn't look so good there either. The speeches are bloated, the cowboy banter is self-conscious, the themes muddy. Next big trouble comes when you begin to feel that the film was slapped together in about 62 hours. Those who love Nicholson will walk away angry because the middle-aged rebel has been strait-jacketed and glucosized into some lousy love story. The only palatable thing...
...BITTER FRUIT of this presentiment of life's decline proliferates throughout the book, which is a chronological narration of a road trip in the 1974-75 season, and expresses itself in many less conscious descriptions. In his digressions, Bradley dwells on the sick and aged members of the very veteran Knicks, especially his roommate Dave DeBusschere, who is playing his last year--he pays no attention to rookies. The book begins with a short dream vignette in which the author's past presides over a timeless game with unrecognizable opponents. After feeling the guilt of a poor first three quarters...
Without such a faith, however, the awful attraction to violence and degradation eventually took its toll on Lawrence. He became acutely conscious of how he was "using" the Arabs to live out personal dreams and to fight his fear of death. Ultimately, Lawrence could not endure the central psycho-social fact that no matter how diligently man serves humanity, he inevitably serves himself in doing so. Lawrence, more than anyone, would feel uneasy about the psycho-historical movement; in his later life, he often prayed and pleaded to be free of his mainly self-analytical insights...