Word: melish
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...George Melish, the flashy nova of John Lahr's second novel, is not quite Santayana's last puritan, and his cries are more like yelps. He is, in fact, the butt of Lahr's ambivalent sympathy for the generation currently entering middle age-those who succeeded within the old rules only to find that the next wave of hustlers was trying to change the game entirely...
...Melish is bringing up the rear of the '50s, when early marriage and career were regulations, not options. Like his father, the famous movie producer Sol Melish, George has made a name for himself as the youngest director of programming in the history of ABC television. His résumé is like one of those glittery staircases in a Fred Astaire movie. As a Boy Scout, George belonged to the elite Order of the Arrow. At Yale, it was Bones and the Daily News. There was also a year at Oxford, where he met and married Irene Trewin...
...moments of doubt (which is to say most of the '60s), Melish calms himself by meditating on the contents of his wallet. There is a secret-society pin, a silver matchbook from his wedding and-not to be believed-a condom. Melish is a clear case of arrested development, a closet sentimentalist carrying a cherished artifact of his hot-to-trot days at a time when everyone else seems to be in full gallop...
...once sedate wife Irene, who has thrown George over for a young rock-'n'-roll star. A good part of the novel seems to take place in a tree house, where George secretly watches his wife and her hairy lover do their act in what was once Melish's own bedroom. From his preadolescent perch, George reviews his life like a man flipping the dial on a TV set. It is an apt literary device considering that George is a victim of the same attitudes that he has watered down and packaged for mass prime-time consumption...
Other speakers at the meetings were the Rev. William Howard Melish, a personal friend of DuBois, and Herbert Aptheker, an authority on Negro history, a Marxist scholar and the recipient of all DuBois' personal papers...