Word: magicianly
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...uncertain what they were fighting for. "The jungles stood dark and unyielding. The corpses gaped. The war itself was a mystery. Nobody knew what it was about, or why they were there, or who started it, or who was winning, or how it might end." Wade is an amateur magician nicknamed "Sorcerer" by his unit, and Vietnam becomes a place where he tries to make reality go away; it is a perfect training ground for the subterfuge and surveillance tricks people also use in love...
...versatile tale spinner. He usually writes about outsiders: artists, adventurers and dreamers on the run from conformity. This partly explains the years Theroux lived abroad. Now an ex-expatriate, he is apparently still edgy enough about the U.S. to live near the exits, in Massachusetts and Hawaii. Millroy the Magician (Random House; 437 pages; $24) gives us a good idea...
...Theroux updates the story of the prophet without honor in his own country. For prophet one could read writer, although the plot of this allusive entertainment gallops on its own. The style is picaresque, the message is salvation through health food, and the medium is Millroy, a road-show magician. Part Jesus, part Prospero, part yogi, he alone would make this a novel to conjure with. But Theroux adds another delight, Jilly Farina, a plucky adolescent with an artless narrative voice that, like Huckleberry Finn's, grabs and holds the reader's attention from the first page: "I had walked...
...heavies, moreover, are considerably less frightening than those in real life. Murders on these shows are nearly always committed by well-groomed, well-to-do white people, and the deeds are neat, bloodless, imaginatively staged. In recent weeks we have seen a magician drown in a tank of water when his escape trick is sabotaged (Diagnosis Murder); a late-night TV host electrocuted by his microphone at a Friars-type roast (Burke's Law); and a manic-depressive book editor driven to near madness and pushed off a building roof to feign a suicide (Murder, She Wrote). Murders are never...
...here tonight is a murderer, and I'm going to prove it," Van Dyke announces just before exposing the magician's killer. What's nice about TV mysteries, as opposed to real-life ones, is that the culprit is always "here tonight." Which may be one reason why the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding story has struck such a chord. Kerrigan's attacker was not, as most people assumed at first, a crazed fan or a random nut. The crime appears to have been -- just like TV! -- an elaborately plotted effort by another skater's camp to eliminate a rival...