Word: magic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This stroke is audacious and illuminating. What is a fairy-tale line doing in a story filled with accidents and misfortunes? It is alerting everyone to the presence of magic that was there all along, dogging the hero but also yanking him out of the rut of predictability. Cheever does not often introduce direct trappings of the supernatural; The Enormous Radio and The Swimmer violate physical laws, and a woman in The Music Teacher acts suspiciously like a real witch. But an aura of wonder bathes even those stories most absorbed in everyday details...
...think, but because they make it impossible for us to remain settled in our comfortable old beliefs. They expose the tangled, jury-rigged pulleys and levers that operated behind the quiet, smooth facades of the old Hollywood myth machines. The exposed machines still work, but the illusion of smooth magic has disappeared; their contrivedness is obvious...
Joseph Mitchell, whom he calls "the best writer at the New Yorker," Mitchell, he says, can write about people without seeming to examine them or condescend to them. "The sentences seem to have appeared there on magic slates--the whole process looks effortless...
...book, Magic, Myth and Medicine, Dr. Donald Atkinson describes how Balavignus, a Jewish doctor in the Strasbourg area, "following the sanitary laws set down by Leviticus . . . had all refuse burned. Naturally the rats left the ghettos and gravitated to gentile quarters in search of food. The Jews consequently suffered less from the disease than did their Christian neighbors . . . This was so noticeable that the Jews at once fell under suspicion." So the Christians murdered nearly all of the Jewish population...
Sixteen once again proved to be the magic number in Kansas City yesterday as the Royals roared back to life in Game Two of the American League playoffs, smothering the New York Yankees by a 10-4 score and evening the series at one game apiece...