Word: idler
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Peter C. Johnson-Back Room at the Idler...
Peter C. Johnson-Back Room at the Idler...
Paul Rishell-Back Room at the Idler...
...stories for 12-year-old boys is a question settled beyond doubt by this readable and authoritative biography: he was also, at the very least, the jaunty and flamboyant hero of an extraordinary life story. Frank McLynn's Robert Louis Stevenson (Random House; 567 pages; $30) describes a hardworking idler, a Scottish Calvinist who remade himself as a romantic and (four days out of any seven) a convincing bohemian, a smothered son who remained boyish all his short life, and an invalid who lived a life of arduous travel and physical adventure. (Another frail, literary, boyish adventurer of the time...
...Some idler is sure to begin a critique of Stephen Fry's funny, sharp-tongued novel The Hippopotamus (Random House; 290 pages; $21) by referring loftily to the title character as "the eponymous hippopotamus." Shun this pedant, who should consider another line of work. Read the novel, however. Its virtues are cynicism and ill will, directed energetically at all that is trendy and modern, and embodied in the blubbery, whiskified carcass of an out-of-date poet named Ted Wallace...