Word: friedman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...language of flashed lights and hand signals. Their oases are the dull-colored, neon-lit truck stops that offer chummy waitresses and hearty food, often throwing in hot showers and cheap rooms for a quick snooze. For a look at the truckers' special world, TIME Correspondent William Friedman hitched a ride with two truckers bound from Chicago to Los Angeles. His report...
...DICK by Bruce Jay Friedman. 310 pages. Knopf...
Like most of the walking wounded in the novels, stories and plays of Bruce Jay Friedman, Kenneth LePeters is a smudge of ethnic traditions, sexual and racial conflicts, and the internal bleeding caused by the status game - America's most dangerous contact sport...
...itself includes such legends of cop-hood as Detective Teener, who has been so chipped away by criminals' bullets that his body is composed almost entirely of spare parts, and Detective Medici, the Dean of Child Molestation. Put with all the robust vulgarity and double-entendre that Bruce Friedman obviously intends, the book's central issue is: Can 40-year-old Ken LePeters get his parts together long enough to become a full-blooded American Dick...
...question can be taken or left for what it is as long as Friedman sticks to the mimicry of detective-story dialogue, journalism cliches, police-blotter prose, and the series of burlesque lech-skits that give The Dick its basic shape. But when, as he does at the end, Friedman tries to graft existential pur pose onto his low-comedy hero, the ques tion becomes an embarrassment. Any second banana could have told him it wouldn't shtik...