Word: houseguested
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...prosperous private trash collector, will be able to live up to the lofty standards of manners and deportment that prevail in the Graves family. Still, the weather is sunny and warm enough to soothe implicit tensions. And everyone is looking forward to another marvelous breakfast prepared by the houseguest of the past week, Chuck Burgoyne...
Nothing in this scene overtly suggests the imminence of comic catastrophe. But experienced readers of Thomas Berger will immediately put on their crash helmets and fasten the safety belts. Newcomers are advised to follow suit. The Houseguest, Berger's 15th novel, picks up some of the pieces scattered by the explosive anarchy of his Neighbors (1980). Once again, an apparently stable domestic setting warps and buckles into chaos, and kindred characters struggle to adjust to a world in which the outrageous has suddenly become the norm...
There are occasions, Amos admits, when the distortions of life far exceed those of art. Evelyn Waugh's scapegrace Basil Seal (Black Mischief) is based in part on an aristocrat who might have arrived from the set of early Monty Python. As a houseguest, Basil Sheridan Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Fourth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, liked to borrow a pound from the butler and later tip him with it. The title character of V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas is a version of the author's father, a West Indian journalist. Seepersad Naipaul publicly labeled the rite...
DIED. Robert Gottschalk, 64, founder-president of Panavision, Inc., who invented light, noiseless, hand-held cameras and lenses that won him an Academy Award and made "Camera by Panavision" one of the screen's most familiar credits; of stab wounds; in Los Angeles. Police arrested a male houseguest with whom, they say, he had had a "falling...