Word: nicholsons
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Thus collectors must be interesting, no? No, it turns out, in Geoff Nicholson's cheerfully loopy comic novel Hunters & Gatherers (Overlook; 215 pages; $21.95). Nicholson's hero, a feckless would-be writer named Steve Geddes, has unwisely taken a publisher's advance to produce a book on collectors. But the collector collector finds that his subjects, though daft, are stunningly boring. An obsessed gatherer of sounds has recorded utter silence in Namibia, the Sahara and the Australian Outback. One human rodent, who promises to show Geddes the world's largest beer-can collection, leads him to a completely empty room...
Quite understandably, Geddes is becalmed with writer's block. Becalmed with impotence too, though the beautiful Victoria, a collector of lovers, works tirelessly to cure him. Nicholson's tale is not so much a novel as a collection of loosely related fiction riffs, but it does not suffer at all from its lack of connective tissue. His imaginings are always peculiar, frequently droll, and on several occasions funny, about car freaks, salesmen, book critics, sex and the alarming sort who acquire the complete works of novelists. Worth collecting; first editions available...
...particularly strong start. After the 35-pound weight throw, in which junior Stephen McCauley was outdistanced by two feet, the Crimson ripped off first places in five straight events. The troika of freshman Josh Nicholson (6'4"), junior Terrence Mann (6'2") and senior Joseph Ghartey (6'2") combined for a high jump sweep and five points in the scorebook...
...Fermata by Nicholson Baker (Random House). The author, whose specialty is upwardly pretentious soft porn, is puffed as a writer of something like satire, with something like a point of view. Baloney, as proved by this latest aid to heavy breathing: the smarmy tale of a fellow who learns how to stop the universe momentarily and uses the trick to undress women, then masturbate...
...Little Man Tate, as well as E.T., The Miracle Worker, The Wild Child, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, Forrest Gump and Green Mansions (the last with Audrey Hepburn memorably miscast as Rima the Bird Girl). Nell is a fable of emergence and transcendence. Written by William Nicholson and Mark Handley, from Handley's play Idioglossia, it illustrates the familiar movie moral that wounded creatures are powerful ones, with powerful lessons to teach those who would presume to educate them. It's humanism at its most Panglossian. But Michael Apted, who has directed vigorous woodland women before (Sissy...