Word: murdochs
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...IRIS MURDOCH...
Early in this glittering examination of love's disguises in the London suburbs, Novelist Iris Murdoch introduces Blaise Gavender, a successful psychotherapist whose practice is among the well-to-do. Murdoch's tone is aldous, which is to say it seems to promise an ever-so-dry, Huxleian sort of farce: "He received an early lesson from a patient who always wore gloves because she said she had the stigmata. It was a little while before it occurred to Blaise to ask her to remove the gloves. She had the stigmata, and was later successfully treated for hysteria...
...some ways this is the customary Murdoch blend of incipient farce, domestic tragicomedy and intellectual soap opera. Baroque pratfalls occur as usual, but neither the release of laughter nor the expected snicker of superiority (what odd and frightful people!) follows. Blaise knows that his psychological theorizing is mostly cant, yet he does have a knack for helping his patients. His visits to sharp-tongued Emily's apartment are mixed blessings-it is a hate nest in which the girl spends a good deal of time demanding money to have her teeth fixed. Harriet at first seems too kind...
Morality Tale. If Novelist Murdoch is not playing for laughs, what is she up to? As the novel's title says explicitly, the author, who looked at love sentimentally in The Black Prince, is now coldly exploring its mechanistic aspect. In mockery she has made her central figure a psychologist, who supposedly manipulates the mind's mechanisms and who effects his cures by forming "love relationships" with his clients...
Known homosexual activity has declined drastically both at Fort Worth and at Framingham, which has been coed since 1973. Explains Convicted Murderer Murdoch MacDonald, a Framingham resident: "Just to be around women releases uptight fantasies. It lessens homosexual actions." At the Robert...