Word: freeland
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Horace Freeland Judson observed in The Eighth Day of Creation, this sort of synergy is, above all, what Rosalind Franklin lacked. Working in a largely male field in an age when women weren't allowed in the faculty coffee room, she had no one to bond with--no supportive critic whose knowledge matched her gaps, whose gaps her knowledge matched...
...Princeton, the Nude Olympics is in danger of being phased out, as several students had to be taken to the hospital after what seems to be a hardcore version of Primal Scream. Junior Christopher R. Freeland explains further: "Basically everyone just ran in a big circle around the perimeter of the inside of this courtyard for about 45 minutes. I thought it would be weird, but it was actually kind of exhilarating. It was an adrenaline rush for a few minutes, but it got old pretty fast. Also, there was a ton of wide open sex, which is pretty cool...
...globe should need another umbrous island, anchored by one man's imagination halfway between Iceland and Greenland, is not something novelist (and former TIME contributor) Brad Leithauser bothers to explain. If you don't like Freeland, the gray and chilly outpost of which he is the sole curator of history, customs and current events, then chase your moonbeams in Lake Wobegon or your copperheads in Yoknapatawpha County...
...advice here, however, is to stick with The Friends of Freeland (Knopf; 508 pages; $26), an amiable and decidedly quirky novel. Its narrator, Eggert Oddason, is chief speechwriter and grand vizier to Freeland's President, a gifted though alcoholic giant named Hannibal Hannibalsson. After 20 years of ever decreasing coherence, Hannibalsson breaks a solemn promise to retire and runs for, or lurches blearily toward, a fifth five-year term. Can he win? His opponent is a woodenhead, and being booze-soaked is no bar to high office, since that is pretty much the permanent condition of most of the population...
...reader ventures through territory like this, the question arises, "Yes, it's clever, but what's the point?" With Leithauser's novel, that question is precisely not the point. The author, who has spent time in Iceland and the Faroes, invented Freeland not to write a political parable but because the more he thought of this imagined place, the more it fascinated him. Its texture is rich and believable. Early in his career the President bankrupted the small nation to build an old folks' home at the base of a big mountain. Now, "mountain-viewing" is local slang for dying...