Word: mother-in-law
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...there is the "I don't recall," a sort of buck pass to one's memory. Blaming the state is a standby too, as are blaming modernity, one's mother, the computer and the post office. "The dog ate my homework" is a favorite with schoolchildren. And a new plane of inventiveness was reached recently when a Virginia man killed his mother-in-law in the garage with a hatchet and explained that he mistook her for a raccoon...
...Corde. A journalist by profession, he is an insider of the outside world--and for the last ten years a professor of journalism and dean of students at a Chicago college. The novel finds Corde far from home, stuck in a small apartment in Bucharest, waiting for his mother-in-law to die. Meditatively, he licks the wounds of recent Chicago battles--battles which rage unabated, awaiting his return. While ineptly ministering to the miseries of his emigre/astronomer ("Palomar calibre") wife. Minna (perhaps Bellow is losing his old feisttness: this protagonist is happily married, with no Renatas or Ramonas...
...underclass are not the only element in The Dean's December. Bellow may not have achieved the great foray into the alien waters he had hoped for, but he remains brilliantly entertaining on his home turf. In particular, his characters are dazzling. Valeria Raresh, Corde's mother-in-law, for whom the Corders have traveled to Rumania (Bellow, incidentally, also went to Bucharest several years ago with his mathematician wife on a similar journey) lies in a state hospital, her face criss-crossed with tapes and tubes. After a coronary and a stroke, it is only a matter of time...
...fiery riots, Brixton was staging a fair to raise funds for a local, racially mixed school. Dressed in a turquoise coatdress and squired by beaming Expectant Father Prince Charles, Diana was greeted with an impromptu baby shower. Among the gifts: a Teddy bear, a toy corgi (her mother-in-law's favorite breed of dog), a 12-lb. loaf of West Indian bread baked in the shape of a duck, and a lapel button that said CHARLIE IS MY DARLING. The royal couple never carry money, so an aide had to slip Di and Charles a few pence when...
...literary result is Albert Corde, the latest and best of Bellow's old cogitators. Corde, a Chicago college dean, spends a great deal of time in an underheated Bucharest apartment waiting for his mother-in-law to die in a state hospital and mulling over the retreat of "personal humanity" before "the worldwide process of consolidation." The woman was an eminent psychiatrist and former Minister of Health whose humanism was incompatible with the Communist regime. Corde's wife Minna is an astrophysicist who defected to the U.S. and must now beg a vindictive bureaucracy for permission...