Word: freak
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...nearly 400 pages, The Great American Novel is part of the same line. Ostensibly a baseball epic of the 1943 Ruppert Mundys, the book is to contemporary fiction what silicone injections are to topless dancing. It is an extravagant mockery of form, a freak show aggressively thrust at the public. "Read me big boy till I faint," Roth seems to be saying, in a paraphrasing of Portnoy's burlesque-queen fantasy. He seems to have cleaned his desk drawers of every party bit and wild turn. He has also researched his subject, spending hours at the baseball Hall...
...time when hard-boiled movies are derigeur, a film on a religious theme can appear embarrassingly sentimental. Zeffirelli's has personal interpretation of the St. Francis legend does just that. And at a time when "Godspell" has recently been slapped onto the screen, and the term Jesus-freak is flung at a goodly portion of our "alienated" generation, a modern version of the same legend which stresses the similarities between past and present draws a yawn of boredom without any trouble...
...unwelcome in White's screenplay. To illustrate that Max's coarseness and brutality are only a defense, he has him dress in layers of clothing, ragged protective armor that Max sheds in a perilously symbolic striptease. It will not do for White to have Lion just freak out; he must grow blank and rigid right on the stone paws of a lion that decorates a Detroit fountain. Director Schatzberg (The Panic in Needle Park, Puzzle of a Downfall Child) bats out these sorry epiphanies and maudlin metaphors with the eager aplomb of a rookie swatting fungoes...
High Costs. Most important to the new users is coke's current status as an "in" drug. "It's the height of fashion," says a well-heeled snow freak, "because it shows success." A "spoon" (usually half a gram) of cocaine costs between $25 and $50, and lasts an ordinary user just one evening. Heavy snorters spend several hundred a week. It is considered chic to inhale coke through a tightly rolled $100 bill. Silver straws from Tiffany's, intended for creme de menthe, are also used. Expensive vials and snuffboxes are popular too. Priest, a coke...
This gleefully savage little novel introduces fiction's most dedicated bird freak since Augie March swept through Mexico with an eagle in tow. George Gattling, an otherwise sober, hardworking owner of an auto-seatcover business in Gainesville, Fla., is determined to train a red-tailed chicken hawk, which he keeps perched on his wrist. Frequently consulting his talismanic text, The Art of Falconry by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, George croons to the hawk, fasts when it fasts, even takes it with him when he goes to bed with his girl friend...