Word: fermata
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...Fermata by Nicholson Baker (Random House). The author, whose specialty is upwardly pretentious soft porn, is puffed as a writer of something like satire, with something like a point of view. Baloney, as proved by this latest aid to heavy breathing: the smarmy tale of a fellow who learns how to stop the universe momentarily and uses the trick to undress women, then masturbate...
...phone-sex relationship -- that he is producing something like satire, driven by something like a point of view. A concept for our times: how safe can sex get, not just from infection but from imperfection, and of course from conception, though not from Baby Bell? His new novel, The Fermata (Random House; 303 pages; $21), is somewhat less elevated. A fermata, in music, is the extension of a note, chord or rest. What is extended, or stopped, in Baker's tale is the forward motion of the universe. His hero, a fellow named Arno Strine, has discovered that...
...Fermata indulges in a voyeuristic tease...
...cards indicate that as a ten-year-old she was inclined to be noisy and inattentive. She "needs to be very busy or she will gain superficial social superiority," was the comment on one of them, adding that "at heart she is kindly." Ceezee ended her academic career at Fermata, a very social, now defunct girls' school at Aiken, S.C., where she did best at French and Latin, worst at cooking and sewing, and admits: "I spent most of my time riding...
...Some Fermata alumnae: Katrina McCormick, daughter of Mrs. Albert Gallatin Simms (Ruth Hanna McCormick); Gladys Széchényi, daughter of the Hungarian Minister to the U. S.; Elizabeth Elkins (Philadelphia socialite); Nancy Heckscher, niece of Philanthropist August Heckscher; Janet White, daughter of Mrs. Richard S. Aldrich (wife of the socialite Representative from Rhode Island...