Word: harvey
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...Harvey Brenner, Ph.D...
...later Spark reveals that, however much Harvey objects, "The thought that Effie was a member of a terrorist band now excited Harvey sexually." Though Harvey and Effie are still in love with each other, they exaggerate their individual characteristics--Harvey with the Book of Job, Effie with a machine gun--in an attempt to prove how really separate they...
Spark's effortless casual linkage of a bad marriage and a shooting spree is not the least of her accomplishments. One of the lasting delights of the book is Spark's almost infallible ear. At a press conference about his wife, a reporter asks Harvey...
Spark generously and cleverly shares her wit with her characters. When, at the press conference, a reporter draws an analogy between Harvey and job, Harvey retorts, "I am hardly in the position of Job. He was covered with boils, for one thing, which I am not." Talking of Job, Harvey reveals something of Spark's own intentions when he observes that "He not only argues the problem of suffering, he suffered the problem of argument. And that is incurable." Spark, cautioned by her own character, does not argue for her own moral position but directs all her energies...
...Only Problem has any formal difficulties, they lie in the beginning of the book. Harvey is the novel's central and most appealing character; but the story does not begin by focusing on him. Although Spark's narration is usually smooth, the reader feels something of a jolt when the camera begins to follow Harvey's life exclusively. Here the author seems to have had an unclear idea of the nature of effect she wanted for her novel; she seems to have been torn between making it a cartoon and making it a movie. Perhaps this is not a great...