Word: marination
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...California woman and by empirical evidence will piece together Charlotte Douglas's life. It is through this narration that we learn that Charlotte believes the world is peopled with others like herself and, as a result, selectively remembers events to conform to this idea. Charlotte has lost her child, Marin, to history, and this event disrupts the complacency of her life. The newspaper accounts and pictures of Marin--this Patty Hearst-type revolutionary, who speaks over television and radio about the "fascist police" and the "class struggle"--in no way mesh with the sweet personality that Charlotte declares is Marin...
...poeple using each other, are all victims of this selective memory--the only way in which Charlotte, as a child of a comfortable family in the temperate zone, can come to term with the present. Grace tells us, "she was immaculate of history and innocent of politics." Marin's disappearance is "the only event in Charlotte's life to resist her revisions and erasures." Ultimately, it is Marin who makes Charlotte realize that "it" really does not come out alright...
...brother had died in a wild shootout while trying to kidnap hostages from the Marin County courthouse, presumably in order to bargain for Jackson's free dom. Davis had been circumstantially tied to the episode...
...Charlotte's accomplishments is the ability to perform emergency tracheotomies. She can also catch chickens and snap their necks with one smooth motion. Warren is a monstrous lout and a failure whose "face had been coarsened by contempt," whose "mind had been coarsened by self-pity." Their daughter Marin ("good strong hair and an I.Q. of about 103") grows up to be a skyjacker and a fugitive Marxist. Her resemblance to Patty Hearst can hardly be coincidental. Charlotte's second husband is also a familiar type out of the recent past-a successful San Francisco lawyer who travels...
Charlotte travels to escape unpleasantnesses like Warren-and the FBI, which keeps pestering her about Marin's whereabouts. In Boca Grande she spends a good deal of time at the airport and the hotel pool. She involves herself in some social work, has an affair and attempts to introduce lively cocktail society into the torpid tropics. In the end. Charlotte fails to heed the unmistakable signs and explicit warnings that precede one of Boca Grande's periodic coups, and is shot by one side or the other...