Word: kunen
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...NOBODY likes a smart-ass, remember that," someone over thirty told me last summer. I had doubts about the dogma even then, but now I'm certain that it's false. James Simon Kunen, 20 years old and a sometimes Columbia revolutionary, is a smart-ass if ever there was one, and Time, The New Republic, Newsweek, and the New York Times all love him and his first book, The Strawberry Statement...
...without reason. Kunen is funny, at times profoundly funny, and The Strawberry Statement is one of the easiest books to pick up and read through to come along in quite a while. A case in point is his comparison of the roaches in his apartment to the enemy in our current...
There is a certain savagery implicit in this word play with the rhetorical commonplaces of what President Nixon called the other night our most serious political problem. But part of Kunen's Statement seems to be that the Vietnam War is simply to grotesque to be taken seriously--it must be an outrageous hoax, perpetrated on everyone with sensibilities by some anonymous "Biggies." So it is also with the military-industrial complex, which Kunen can only talk about with the elaborate fantasy of "The Big Letter" which he expects may arrive any day -- "I wasn't sure what it would...
...Strawberry Statement is, or a least tries to be, more than a collection of such deadly wise cracks. But as a book, it faces some formidable problems. The Columbia affair, in which Kunen was a front line-participant, is pretty well wrapped up by page fifty, and where the book will go from there is by no means certain. The rest can be read as a chronicle of Kunen's incestuous relationship with his Random House contract. He treats the book like a colossal term paper, trying to get started and finding ever-fresh devices for procrastination. Like Mailer...
...SPEND too much time reading the book," Kunen advises in the last of a series of four introductions, "because I didn't spend much time writing it." Still, it would be good to know what Kunen thinks he's doing with the book, and that's not easy to say. Perhaps all the wit, self-deflation, and incidental reporting are just softening up Mr. and Mrs. America for the punch of Kunen's radical message." "A good D.J. is friendly, congenial and amusing, the sort of person you trust," he notes after the WABC interview, and perhaps a good young...