Word: dominie
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Seriously, though these nine short stories by John Domini (who does teach Expos 18) are a lot more fun to read than any Expos paper. Domini's authorial voice is far from polished, his imagery and recurrent motifs reveal some weird phobias and preoccupations, but by and large the events that unfold in real and unreal locales (two stories are set after death and one involves astral projection) compel and haunt...
...Domini's main strengths lie in violent, unconventional metaphor and involved plotting--so involved, in fact, that bristling complexities, few of which are ever resolved, end by frustrating or intimidating the reader. A favorite theme seems to be the middle-aged protagonist grappling with the leftover complications of long-ago some adventure that ripped the fabric of a conventional life: a successful businessman, whom the CIA drugged with LSD 20 years ago as a random experiment, throws himself into the public eye by suing the government for his life's subsequent turmoil; a Vietnam veteran, past 30, goes to Florida...
Another stubbornly ubiquitous villain, or maybe scapegoat--for whatever it reveals about Domini's private paranoias--is the executive woman. Sometimes her domain is T.V. production, but she masquerades too as a plant-store employee named Priss, striding into a narrator's office "all body," and telling him. "People like you marry people like me;" as the intense 17-year-old wife of the teenage narrator; even in one post-mortem fantasy, as a formless floating femine "blob" of a soul whose outer layer develops iron patches when her philosophizing outstrips the narrator's comprehension...
...Friday the 20th, from 4:30 to 6, Grolier will fete John Domini, whose novel Bedlam has just come out from Fiction International. Bedlam's genre is definitely a rarity for Grolier, says the bookstore's owner. Louisa Solano: "Domini and Monroe Engel are the only two novelists I allow in the store...