Word: nathaneal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...avoid such extremes, the U.S. may be forced to take strong measures to bring down inflation. Grove and Washington Economic Consultant Robert Nathan reluctantly vote for a "quick and dirty" solution that would include draconian measures. Says Grove: "The ideal program would be very sharp fiscal and monetary policies buttressed at the outset by wage and price controls. The controls would be cosmetic, to convince people that the program is really going to work." Okun scorns this as the "trillion-dollar cure," meaning that it would cost the nation that much in lost production. He believes that such a solution...
Styron tells his story through Stingo, an aspiring Tidewater writer who has come to New York in search of literary fame and fortune. He settles in a boarding house in Brooklyn, where he meets Nathan and Sophie, obsessive lovers, Olympic sexual athletes, and partners in mental disease. In its particulars, Sophie's Choice evokes Styron's own experience as a young writer struggling with hisfirst novel; in its overall scheme, it is Stingo's Bildungsroman, the story of a young man travelling north and discovering the nature of evil...
...Nathan's other competitor is Amy Bellette, a young researcher sent by Harvard to compile Lonoff's papers. She wants to take him to Italy for a life of truth and beauty. Nathan would like to go himself, because he is perversely excited by Amy's resemblance to Anne Frank. He imagines a lengthy scenario in which Anne survives Hitler's extermination camps to become Miss Bellette, who reasons that if she were known to be alive, her Diary would be read merely as a teen-age adventure story...
...real Amy curtly evades Nathan's questions about her background. She is a smart and very tough cookie. As is Lonoff; as is Zuckerman; as is Roth himself. The Ghost Writer is a bruising book. Within its artfully tangled plot, Roth tells off his critics and debunks romantic notions of the writing life. Henry James' "passion of doubt" and "madness of art" become a medieval incubus and fanatic patience; Lonoff, more the ascetic Old World Jew than his Yankee trappings might indicate, spends all his time pushing sentences around and worrying about them. His comment on writing...
Roth gets it just right: the cadences and diction of the provincial and the pretentious, the fresh edge of Nathan's ambition, his helpless rage and the confusion of his victims. Zuckerman will do anything for a good line. He imagines going home with news for his mother. "I met a marvelous young woman while I was up in New England. I love her and she loves me. We are going to be married." "Married? But so fast? Nathan, is she Jewish?" "Yes, she is." "But who is she?" "Anne Frank...