Word: larch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...impossible to miss Irving's message, but his method of conveying it is ingenious in the extreme. The tale begins in the 1880s, when Wilbur Larch graduates from Bowdoin College in Maine. As a present his father buys the young man a night with a Portland prostitute. Larch gains from this experience a sense of shame, a case of gonorrhea and the conviction that he can do very nicely without any more sex in the future. During his years at Harvard Medical School, Larch develops a fondness for sniffing ether and a knowledge of the appalling problems that unwanted pregnancies...
...Larch says this to Homer Wells, a young man born at the orphanage whose various sojourns with foster families have all ended in failure. Since Homer seems destined to stay in St. Cloud's, Larch urges him to "be of use," and the lad complies. He begins by taking over the nightly readings to the younger children; those in the boys' wing hear David Copperfield or Great Expectations, and the girls get Jane Eyre. The idea of featuring great novels about orphans is Dr. Larch's: "What in hell else would you read to an orphan?" Homer's duties gradually...
...Cloud's in the persons of Wally Worthington and Candy Kendall, a glittering couple who come to St. Cloud's for a familiar reason. Wally will someday inherit Ocean View Orchards, a thriving apple farm just off the Maine seacoast, and Candy will someday marry him, once Dr. Larch terminates the symptom of their careless passion...
...restrictions imposed by these skills are also evident. In the world according to Irving, characters are the passive victims of life. They are either children or childlike, dependent on forces beyond their control. They "wait and see" (an ongoing refrain in this novel), wondering, like Homer and Dr. Larch, "What is going to happen to me?" What literally happens to them, of course, is the tricks, sometimes macabre, visited upon them by their creator...
...seeing Arbus as a person who liked gutsy challenges and reveal her as someone unable to face reality. Thirteen years after her death the myth of Diane Aubus has ripened. The portray presented here tries to accomodate the fantastic element, to take the mythic status as a given and larch on to descriptions that pander to it. The result is that the public must still await a sensitive treatment of the troubled yet enigmatic person behind the lens...