Word: idiotically
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...massive sombrero. Timilty looks decidedly uncomfortable. A young woman dressed up as Mr. Bill from Saturday Night Live screeches up to the candidate and asks to take his picture. Her friend, in a President Carter costume, stands next to Timilty and the mask grins like an idiot. Timilty grins, too--but he just doesn't look that happy
Barth is least of all an idiot, and this schema for each of his characters obviously governs his own writing of Letters--this novel that incorporates each of his past protagonists, that takes every one of his old plots and recycles it, that is engaged in eternal omphaloskepsis, a sort of literary autism. That's it--the burden of the past: not a roster of great literary forebears but the author's own bibliography. Barth is getting older, and he hasn't found his Theme. Letters is his middle-age-crisis objectified into a monstrosity. No one can fault Barth...
...never really resolves the debate. "I'm home," declares the Ripper, and Time After Time adapts his fascination with depravity often, leisurely surveying San Francisco's Tenderloin District, or turning an average disco into an inferno of churning bodies. Yet Meyer seems reluctant to condemn Wells as an idealistic idiot. Though disappointed in the future, his hero grows firmer in his convictions; climaxing a passionate speech, Wells insists, "the man who raises his fist is the man who lacks ideas." McDowell speaks the lines so movingly, he prompts the viewer to believe him (and the banker to declare she loves...
...America. It is not a very exciting moment. She talks a lot about "love" and the press pool snickers audibly. The Pope listens thoughtfully--perhaps he is just trying to understand her accent--and then steps forward. He reads his welcoming response. Now the photographers are angry--some idiot had lowered the microphones so they block the Holy Father's face. But at least he's worn his red cape--if he'd been in white the pictures would be horrible...
Like the little boy of The Painted Bird, Kosinski wandered the villages of Eastern Europe alone while World War II ravaged the continent. Like the idiot of Being There, Kosinski abandoned Europe for the United States, arriving there stupid and mute. And like the heroes of his later novels, he married a fabulously wealthy widow who died six years later leaving him nothing...