Word: hearstly
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...Common Prayer,it seemed that here was another normally-incisive writer succumbing to just one more California fetish. While the National Enquirer alone had been interested in investigating Henry Kissinger's trash, everybody--and we're talking here about the well-established publishing world--wanted to know about Patricia Hearst's closet sex life and continual menstrual cycle. (The California papers followed this latter issue quite closely and the ever-staid New York Times devoted several columns in its Sunday magazine to the constant period, nail polish and diet of this heiress-turned-urban-guerilla-turned-heiress-again...
...there is a point shortly after beginning A Book of Common Prayer when it becomes obvious that, notwithstanding Harper's excerpt, this is not just another Patricia Hearst fixation. Indeed, Harper's selection from the book does not do Didion's novel justice. The book centers on a wealthy family--a radical chic lawyer, with a Warhol silk screen of Mao in the living room, rather than a newspaper magnate--and their newly-converted revolutionary daughter, whose rhetoric makes little sense and at best serves to separate her from her wealthy background, the FBI and a steamy, dull, white-washed...
...Warren is a monstrous lout and a failure whose "face had been coarsened by contempt," whose "mind had been coarsened by self-pity." Their daughter Marin ("good strong hair and an I.Q. of about 103") grows up to be a skyjacker and a fugitive Marxist. Her resemblance to Patty Hearst can hardly be coincidental. Charlotte's second husband is also a familiar type out of the recent past-a successful San Francisco lawyer who travels a lot, defending Black Panthers and arranging arms deals for urban guerrillas. When someone at a party asks Charlotte what he does, she replies...
...apolitical drifter, Ray ("Cat") Olsen, 23, held ten hostages in a Manhattan branch of New York's Bankers Trust Co. for eight hours, demanded that authorities release Patty Hearst and imprisoned members of the Symbionese Liberation Army and pay him $10 million in gold. Result: Olsen gave up and freed all hostages...
...During Watergate and the long ending of the Viet Nam War, when the nation was feeling especially baleful, these characters in an out-of-the-way local TV station, with their family feeling, may have suggested that it was possible to deal with the world without being either Patty Hearst or R.D. Laing. They became part of the viewer's family, comfortable to have around...