Word: nicely
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Whyte also claims that gentrification, one of the symbols of renewed urban vitality, is not the social evil for displaced people it has been made out to be. The real culprit, he contends, is the government decision not to build more housing. "People think you have a nice Italian family, and then you have these peace-eating liberals who push them out. Well, that's not the way it works," Whyte argues. "By and large, many steps have been taking place before the so-called gentrifiers move in. They do not buy from the nice ethnic family and kick them...
...NICE WORK by David Lodge; Viking; 277 pages...
...English movies of the '80s had a team like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, David Lodge's funny, adroit Nice Work would make an ideal vehicle for them. The novel's protagonist, Vic Wilcox, is a gruff but keen-witted exec struggling to turn around a laggard steel-parts factory in Rummidge -- "an imaginary city," the author informs us, "which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world." Vic's antagonist (and here the term is literal) is Robyn Penrose, an attractive, rigorously feminist lecturer...
Bright as its comedy is, Nice Work takes place within a sort of psychological smog spread by England's economy. All the characters, whether they know it or not, are indirect victims of Thatcherism -- Robyn because of the cuts in public spending that have ravaged her university's budget; Vic because of Rummidge's desperate rust-belt competition, which causes his firm to be taken over and him to get the sack; even Robyn's lover Charles because of the post-Big Bang financial speculations that lure him from academe and leave him adrift. This theme weighs a bit heavily...
...born satirist. Swallow's smile exposes teeth set at odd angles, "like tombstones in a neglected churchyard." A receptionist at Vic's factory strokes her platinum-blond hairdo "as if it were an ailing pet." This is a novel that lives up to its own billing: it's nice work...