Word: daft
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...turns out, in Geoff Nicholson's cheerfully loopy comic novel Hunters & Gatherers (Overlook; 215 pages; $21.95). Nicholson's hero, a feckless would-be writer named Steve Geddes, has unwisely taken a publisher's advance to produce a book on collectors. But the collector collector finds that his subjects, though daft, are stunningly boring. An obsessed gatherer of sounds has recorded utter silence in Namibia, the Sahara and the Australian Outback. One human rodent, who promises to show Geddes the world's largest beer-can collection, leads him to a completely empty room. Curses, he says, my hostile wife...
...suspicious and possibly vengeful Cordelia is an even more unsettling companion than the normally daft one. Richard feels guilty for wanting to leave his wife and also for worrying about what his future would be like without her money: " ... all cafes, canteens, pubs, pavements, bus shelters, bus queues, buses...
...with the divination process for its own purposes, maybe to mislead the client with a false message?" What if, indeed? The author's fizz of comic energy is as wild and scornful as Richard Condon's, back when Condon was young and frisky. And as was true with such daft Condon fables as Some Angry Angel, Dooling's story has no detectable point or purpose, except to marvel at the rich variety of human wickedness...
...bravura turn that could sap any star's strength. In the middle of a performance toward the end of the run, Day-Lewis left the stage and did not return. The theater pages were full of rumors that he had seen his father as the ghost and was driven daft. "I have no bad feelings about my father, my father's ghost, the ghost of Hamlet, Hamlet, Shakespeare, Richard Eyre or the National Theatre. But I am continually encouraged to have bad feelings by those who want to perpetuate this idea because, in a moment of exhaustion, I left...
...after all, best known for the zippy romance Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (which became a movie with Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino) and the funny-poignant Lips Together, Teeth Apart (which is now playing in Los Angeles). Among his dozens of plays are daft farces (The Ritz, Bad Habits), an Emmy-winning TV play (Andre's Mother) and a clever sitcom (Mama Malone), but nothing so eloquent, capacious and true as A Perfect Ganesh...