Word: latter-day
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...Human kind cannot bear very much reality," T.S. Eliot observed. Evidently, neither can many prominent novelists. An increasing number are now in flight from the everyday world they used to chronicle. In his latest novel, God's Grace, Bernard Malamud conceived of a latter-day Noah, adrift on an ark. Doris Lessing has taken an apparently irreversible leap into outer space with her multivolume chronicle of "galactic empires." Now Joyce Carol Oates has again wandered off into the never-never land of the neo-gothic romance. In Oates' case, the purpose of the excursion is parody. A Bloodsmoor...
...evokes a peculiar response. Some people conjure up images of civilized, altruistic Christians devoting their lives to instructing ignorant tribesmen in the rudiments of modern medicine. Others think in terms of the colonial exploitation of an economically dependent Third World. But negative stereotypes do not daunt the Church of Latter-Day Saints, popularly known as the Mormon Church, which currently boasts a missionary population of 32,000-35,000 youths...
What Malamud has actually produced is an astonishment: a fable of the last man so bizarre that it defies explication. At first it seems that in the person of Calvin Cohn, the author has in mind a latter-day Noah. Adrift in a boat Cohn is the only human survivor of the "Second Flood" that follows a nuclear war between the "Djanks" and "Druzhkies." Speaking from a crack in the sky, God addresses Cohn: "That you went on living, Mr. Cohn, I regret to say, was no more than a marginal error. . . Therefore live quickly-a few deep breaths...
Lloyd Cutler, who served Jimmy Carter as counsel and advised Shultz during the hearings, sees his new client as a latter-day exemplar of an old American staple, the true citizen-statesman. "Political candidacy is about the only thing that George has missed in his experience," says Cutler. "The revolving-door dimension he brings is something good. By being in Government, his role in private life was enhanced. By being in the private sector, his role in Government is enhanced...
...poems Hardy suggests the way the world looked to him: a primeval landscape dotted with "wind-warped" thorn, where a hawk circles above a hedgehog in a permanent Celtic twilight. Yet, somewhere on the far horizon of his stories, a tiny solitary figure can usually be found: a latter-day Adam, as lost as on the first day after the Fall-or, more likely, an Eve. The storms Hardy stages on his heath are nothing compared with the tempests of sexual passion that tear at the hearts of these lonely wanderers among the thorns: Bathsheba of Far from the Madding...