Word: grownups
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Network programmers like to think of themselves as wacky guys. Just look at the shows they put on the air. In NBC's The Fanelli Boys, four grownup brothers move back to Brooklyn to live with . . . their mother! In CBS's Evening Shade, a man is nonplussed when his wife tells him she's pregnant; he's already had a vasectomy! (Rim shot.) In Fox's Good Grief, Howie Mandel plays a nutty guy who does TV commercials for (hold on to your hats) a mortuary...
...book's hero is Don Rigoberto, a well-to-do widower in Lima who has recently married Dona Lucrecia: "In his youth he had been a fervent militant in Catholic Action and dreamed of changing the world." The grownup Rigoberto has set his sights on a different goal: the pursuit of moments of transcendent personal pleasure. These he seeks in his nightly sessions in the bathroom, where, according to a strict schedule ("The Wednesday Ear Ritual"), he cleans and maintains a different portion of his anatomy; then he gallops toward the marriage bed for inventive trysts with the compliant Lucrecia...
...crank. It has something to do with his belief that everybody is a liar or, as he puts it, "smug and self-satisfied and just close enough to the facts to get by." When young Holden Caulfield complained about phonies, it had the force of discovery. Wexler's grownup bitching sounds more than a little gratuitous. Wife Lily breaks the news sweetly: "These aren't great complaints, you know. They're tired, and small, and self-serving, they're vague -- if I weren't wife-of-wives I'm not certain I'd be charmed...
...both sides, the leadership, such as it is, grows more evasive, craven and empty. In a war of victims, no one plays the grownup. Among the Palestinians, effective moral authority now has a median age of 14 or 15 and a good throwing arm. Fathers and grandfathers have signed over their moral duties to the children in the streets. The traditional patriarchy begins to disintegrate. The Palestine Liberation Organization still serves as banner and facade, but many Palestinians believe that it is increasingly feckless, corrupt and out of touch. The failures of leadership on either side of the struggle collaborate...
Croquet as played in this stretch of paradise is a far cry from the backyard game forced on kids to keep them from killing one another before the hot dogs are served. The grownup version is a maze of complicated tactics, arcane terminology and bizarre rules played against a ticking stopwatch. A good player must have the wrists of Jack Nicklaus, the concentration of Bobby Fischer and the eye of Minnesota Fats. Ricocheting at precisely the right spot off the steel wicket is one way to get the grapefruit-size ball through the narrow hoop, anchored an unforgiving...