Word: jacked
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Jack Maggs' search for Henry Phipps bumps into an immediate obstacle: Phipps is not to be found at the house where Maggs' money installed him. So the convict takes an expedient job as a footman at the house next door, the better to spot Phipps when he returns. Very quickly--Carey mimes perfectly the Victorian novelist's skill at making the implausible seem inevitable--Maggs comes to the attention of one of his master's dinner guests, the rising young author Tobias Oates. When Maggs, serving the wine, collapses from the pain of a tic douloureux in his cheek, Oates...
...abroad. Does that premise sound familiar? It will to those who have read Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and remember Pip's turmoil when he learns that his elevation in society has been financed by the fearsome felon Abel Magwitch. The novel being described here, however, is Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (Knopf; 306 pages; $24). What the dickens is Dickens' plot doing in Carey's new fiction...
Nothing very promising, those familiar with postmodernist literary and largely sterile ironies might guess. In this instance, they would be wrong. For one thing, it is not necessary to know a single word of Great Expectations to have a fine, suspenseful time reading Jack Maggs. Carey takes a cue from Dickens but then ad-libs an original and freestanding performance, replete with the sorts of twists and shocks and coincidences that originally gave page turners a good name. And those readers who retain a clear sense of Dickens' novel will encounter a trove of subtle allusions, not just...
Because of the publishing mores of his time, Dickens could not write directly about prostitutes or abortionists or homosexuals, although coded references to them could be discerned by those in the know. In Jack Maggs, Carey breaks the old code and produces something wonderfully...
Flood waters burst through the window, damaging packages. Where's Jack Dawson when we need...