Word: modesto
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...REVELATIONS OF DR. MODESTO (256 pp.)-Alan Harrington-Knopf...
...CENTRALISM! . . . My system erases the qualities that make you 'different' from other people. It makes you Absolutely Normal-in a matter of hours . . . Gives you a STRANGE POWER over others, for no one can help loving you." The ad is signed in towering capitals: DR. MODESTO...
Moderation Plus Mediocrity. The "revelations" of Dr. Modesto arrive in a large white envelope stamped "CENTRALISM is FOR YOU," and form the core of this uneven but intriguing first novel by Alan Harrington. The doctrine of "Centralism" and what it does to Hal Hingham gives Author Harrington, a Manhattan public-relations man, a slingshot with which to launch provocative pebbles at the panjandrums of selfhelp, the positive thinkers, the conformists, and the problems of 20th-century "adjustment...
...Modesto breaks down Centralism into 30 rules, but its heart is "Don't Be Yourself" ("Since your self grates on others, and makes you miserable, get rid of it"). The happy man is the one "Just Like Everybody Else." To be "more average than anyone,' one must "live centrally," even moving to the center of town...
Despite his seeming success in becoming what Sociologist David Riesman has called an "other-directed" person, Hal Hingham develops a bad case of jitters. At novel's end, he goes in search of the great confidence man himself and, in a sardonic, O. Henry-sudden finale, finds Dr. Modesto rattling the bars in a progressive insane asylum. Hal Hingham is as appealing as he is weak-kneed, and Author Harrington manages to squeeze a wry, comic moral out of his dilemma: self-help is really an inside job, and to pull it off successfully, one must have a self...