Word: federov
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hero of Voices of a Summer Day is Benjamin Federov, a New York businessman who is "no longer young, and. although at a distance his slimness and way of moving gave a deceptive appearance of youth, close-up age was there, experience was there, above all around the eyes . . ." Federov spends a summer afternoon watching his 13-year-old son play baseball in a Long Island beach town, musing between innings about the life that has made his eyes all crinkly with experience...
...trouble is that Federov, an unperceptive man, is not a very good muser. His memories have an odd qualify of seeming secondhand, as if he had anthologized them from Jerome Weidman's up-from-the-Lower-East-Side novels-he even contrives to appropriate the durable episode in which the poor Jewish boy waits tables at a party for rich, contemptuous Yalies and their glossy dates, hardens his honest heart and resolves...
Lost Position. The game ends; Federov's reflections dissipate, having amounted to no computable sum of meaning or meaninglessness. The reader, if he finishes the novel, finishes it without the faintest notion of why the author began it. To this riddle there is no clue in Shaw's recent pronouncement that a writer "is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper; he is on a journey and he is reporting in, giving his position at certain moments of that journey: 'This is where I think I am and this is what this...