Word: helling
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Author Peter De Vries, 73, has a funny habit of stuffing his works with recondite information. Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, his 21st book of fiction, carries on this 31-year-old tradition. Where did the term all hell broke loose first appear? John Milton's Paradise Lost. What did Nietzsche say on the subject of comedy? "That man has invented laughter because he of all species needs it." Why did Ralph Waldo Emerson quit the ministry? "He couldn't swallow the last supper." How, including names and dates, did the U.S. sexual revolution actually begin...
...when he follows Miss Doubloon to her home town. Absurdities interrupt non sequiturs. Plot grows so complicated that it seems easier to tell than summarize. But De Vries is only half kidding. The fine cutting edge of his comic vision comes, as always, from the sense that there is hell to pay. The author, a resident staffer at The New Yorker, was raised a Dutch Calvinist, and he is a past master at striking antithetical poses. He is at once the liberal humanist, tolerantly condoning free expression and yearnings of the flesh; he is also the hooded inquisitor, meting...
...names of towns from Prime Ministers. Less a wonder is that these people sometimes grow hard around the heart; when you've seen one mutilation, you've seen them all. Still, as Arthur Koestler wrote of the war in Spain: "Anyone who has lived through the hell of Madrid with his eyes, his heart, his stomach, and then pretends to be objective, is a liar...
...might do something bold." That unsettling possibility certainly seemed remote enough, but late last week TIME learned of the recent arrival in Managua of Cuba's General Arnaldo Ochoa, Castro's leading specialist in expeditionary forces. "This," says an Administration aide, "is ominous. It worries the hell...
...Ascent into Hell, Greeley...