Word: evens
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Beerbohm, a self-described miniaturist, once devoted an essay to a minister who asked a single meek question of Dr. Johnson. But in this age of miniaturization, Brendan Lehane has gone the Incomparable Max one less. He has devoted an entire book to a subject even more insignificant than an 18th century clergyman-the flea...
...legged hero appears as a villain in Chaucer, Shakespeare and John Donne. Accordingly, the book lives up and down to its title. It even includes a bit of anonymous erotica-"The Autobiography of a Flea," whose expository style even Nabokov might envy. "I was engaged," begins the flea, "upon professional business connected with the plump white leg of a young lady of some 14 years...
Lehane also chronicles the vita activa of the flea as vaudevillian; the flea as athlete (one "can jump about 150 times its own length along, and about 80 times its length up"); the flea as spreader of plague and, in the case of the male, even as sexual tyrant. In mating, says Lehane, a man obviously sympathetic to the underflea, "he grasps her abdomen with his antennae, and sensuously brushes her parts with a wispy membrane. Then violence comes. Copulation lasts about three hours, sometimes as long as nine. ... So sharp and indelicate are the hooks and spines...
...first two novels were A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) and Expensive People (1968), both studies of frustrated love and self-destruction written with the intensity and control of fine short stories. Even before these books, Miss Gates had established herself as a promising young writer of remarkable power and sensitivity. With the publication of Them at the age of 31, she emerges as that rarity in American fiction, a writer who seems to grow with each new book...
Although rooted in case history. Them is fiction in the purist sense: data, perception, feeling transformed by language and imagination into a new existence with a vitality that can even survive critical explanation...