Word: joans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Senator Robert Dole, Ford's caustically witty running mate. A former member of the Federal Trade Commission, Liddy Dole is a poised beauty from North Carolina who manages to soften her husband's gunfighter image. "She's part of our Southern strategy," says Dole proudly. Similarly, Joan Mondale, the vivacious and savvy wife of Senator Walter Mondale, is brightening the Democratic ticket, although she got off to a shocking start. Asked by a television reporter on the West Coast to explain the difference between Watergate and the sex scandals of Democratic Congressman Wayne Hays, Mrs. Mondale said...
Alice in Wonderland is alive and well and living in Margaret Atwood's new novel. She has changed a bit: she operates under the alias Joan Foster, resides in Toronto and writes gothic romances on the sly. But she still has more identities than she knows how to handle, takes pills that make her undergo disconcerting changes of size, and gets into trouble by gazing too long into a looking glass...
Most of the time, Joan Foster is the quietly unremarkable wife of a humorless student radical. In odd stolen hours, she plays mistress to an avant-garde artist who serves as a kind of latter-day Mad Hatter. From both husband and lover, Joan cleverly hides two secret shames: the fact that she produces feverishly romantic gothic novels and her pre-diet-pill memories of a miserably obese childhood. Both are telltale signs of a temperament too florid to suit the doctrinaire, modernist tastes of the men now in her life. One day, seized by a fit of automatic writing...
...baroque mirror." Significantly, the same might be said of Margaret Atwood's writing in Lady Oracle. The novel does not develop; it meanders, circling around and turning in on itself - letting its contours be defined by the chaos of the heroine's psyche. Italicized chunks of Joan Foster's latest gothic romance pop up just when one is expecting the next chapter in her life. The reader is kept off balance by jagged shifts from the comfortable ordinariness of situation comedy to the casual cruelty of slapstick farce to the gripping panic of surreal nightmare...
Crooked Seams. After writing Lady Oracle, Margaret Atwood, like Joan, may have wondered whether she "should have taken it to a psychiatrist instead of a publisher." Fortunately, she did not. For if Atwood's last novel, Surfacing, was her basic black dress of a novel - trim, taut and meticulously crafted - then Lady Oracle is successful motley, a striking work made out of bright patches with all the crooked seams showing...