Word: hexed
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...this type of writing: Billie Raitcliffe has a thing for men who work with radioactivity (personality tic) and a degenerative muscular disease; her husband just left her and she asks her son to euthanize her when her illness gets too severe (societal problem; two, if you count the separation). Hex, her son, has to decide whether he can shoulder the burden of caring for his mother alone (societal problem) even as he copes with his alcoholism and is sever stammer (personality tics...
...plot like this as an excuse to hold a pity party--indeed, probably would have created the plot expressly to condemn the previous generation for messing up the world, etc., etc. But Moody makes no moral judgments on the sad state of affairs in Connecticut that has hemmed Hex and Billie and Billie's husband Lou Sloane into standard suburban lives; instead, he analyzes and describes and unravels character and action and landscape in scintillating prose. He is a young author who chooses to write about rather sordid, dull aspects of modern life, to be sure, but he follows...
...Hex Raitcliffe, as Moody makes very clear in the first short chapter of the novel, is a hero, "and if he's a hero, then heroes are five-and-dime, and the world is as crowded with them as it is with stray pets, worn tires, and missing keys." He is a saint maybe, like one of the exceedingly normal yet extraordinarily courageous and strong characters who populate the works of Anne Tyler; a modern day tragic hero whose Achilles' heel and fatal flaw is a penchant for liquor. Lou Sloane's abrupt and cruel parting from Billie rouses Hex...
...doesn't travel very far, however, because he still loves Billie and because he wants to be useful in the face of a crisis at the nuclear power plant. His wandering contrasts nicely with Hex's, who in the course of the evening on which the book is set takes his mother to a restaurant and to a hospital, drunkenly stalks Lou in an effort to convince him to return to Billie, and kindles a romance with the dreamgirl of his adolescence as she falls into his life "like an influenza." All the while, Hex and Billie are haunted...
...after Halloween, Harvard couldn't exorcise another hex: its losing streak on the road. After pummeling Rhode Island 4-0 in its season opener, the Crimson has now dropped seven straight road contests...