Word: gabe
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...first seasons as Cleveland's General Manager, Gabe Paul will bear the onus of guilt for the most damaging trade of 1962: Vice Power and Dick Stigman to Minnesota for problem-child Pedro Ramos. While Power is hitting and fielding as well as ever, Ramos has won four, lost eight and compiled an E.R.A. of 4.58. The Indians have stopped hitting (team B.A.: .248) and have no power hitters to speak of. They could be headed for the second division...
Contemptuously, Paul Herz gives him a chance to attempt adultery. But Gabe is a moral sort of flounderer, and Libby seems inviolate in her weakness, the more so when Gabe learns that she had an abortion because she and Paul could not afford a baby...
...Gabe and Libby kiss, once. But the misery lingers on, through a trifling affair Gabe has with a girl in Iowa and a serious romance with a divorcee in Chicago...
Probably because of Gabe's early benumbment by Libby, the second affair ends disastrously. Gabe quits teaching and wanders to Europe, dismayed at his spiritual paralysis and bitter, finally, at Libby and her twining weakness...
Flashes, Then Fog. The book ends, therefore, exactly where it began: with a gloomy young man who does not like himself or the world, and does not know why. The sole change in Gabe after 600 pages is that he realizes somewhat more clearly the fact (though not the explanation) of his malaise. Page by page, the novel is a rare pleasure to read; the author's strong, astringent style is always under sure control, and his ability to develop and sustain a characterization is astonishing. But there must be some failure of art when every character...