Word: misfits
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...central character in a typical Tyler novel is a well-meaning but somehow ineffectual hero or heroine, a misfit who wonders how everyone else manages to cope. This time out, it's Barnaby Gaitlin, who turns 30 during the course of this story without having acquired any noticeable trappings of success. "A rented room," his ex-wife Natalie chides him, "an unskilled job, a bunch of shiftless friends. No goals and no ambitions...
...father, a preacher, read from the book of Proverbs. In his heart, however, the 17-year-old was pondering the words of a classmate. "Don't be at prayer circle on Monday," Michael Carneal had told Strong on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Carneal was a bit of a misfit at Heath High School in West Paducah, Ky., one who occasionally wore ill-fitting, loud-colored clothes and had a couple of disciplinary problems (browsing the Playboy Website, digging a sharp object into a wall). But Carneal could also discuss the Shakespeare play assigned to class (Romeo and Juliet) with allusions...
...artificial limbs a year, mostly for people injured in road and train accidents, and a few of the wealthier patients wore American-model limbs. Both were too expensive for the common man, and neither permitted very much mobility. Besides, as Sethi explains, the old artificial limb was a cultural misfit not just for Indians but for people in most developing countries. "We sit, eat, sleep and worship on the floor--all without shoes," he says. Also, the "shoe" attached to the old limb was made of heavy sponge, making it worthless for any farmer working in the rain...
...present and accounted for: the elite military unit; the brutal training program; the sadistic topkick; the misfit recruit, seemingly unfit for hazardous duty--especially since the rest of the troops distrust, even despise...
Both, as it turned out, and the Washington Post book critic and columnist Jonathan Yardley engagingly examines this double identity in Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley (Random House; 255 pages; $23). Yardley makes no inflated claims on behalf of his subject: "Fred was a professional writer, although only one of his three books [A Fan's Notes] will long remain in print." But Exley (1929-1992) intensely interested and exasperated his readers, relatives, friends, casual acquaintances and the victims of his odd-hours telephone monologues, among whom Yardley and this reviewer number themselves. "What a piece of work...