Word: odd
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Where does the solar system end? At Pluto, most folks would reply. Or at Neptune, the cognoscenti might say, because thanks to Pluto's odd, egg-shaped orbit, the eighth planet has been outermost since 1979 and will be through 1998. But astronomers suspect that the sun's family actually extends far beyond either of these two planets. Out there in the frigid darkness beyond any known planet, they believe, lies the Kuiper belt, a ring of dusty ice chunks that surrounds the solar system. Beyond that, astronomers say, is the similarly composed Oort cloud, which forms a vast sphere...
...This idea of race is so odd," she says, earnestly and sincerely. "I believe your ethnicity is a controlling force for other people, but it's got nothing to do with...
...odd practice, this naming of hurricanes. Yet anthropomorphizing nature's brutal forces somehow seems to help people cope with the otherwise incomprehensible devastation wreaked by these storms. So it was with Andrew, a ^ simple name for people to curse, fear, blame and remember. Andrew proved a most powerful, if petulant, child, rampaging across the Bahamas and the populous tip of southern Florida and into Louisiana's Cajun country, with strength enough to hoist trucks atop buildings, destroy houses and vaporize mobile homes, impale yachts on pier pilings and even strip paint off walls. With winds up to 164 m.p.h., Andrew...
...that what few pupils he takes study only his curriculum. There is Henry, rich, seductive, depraved; Francis, a homosexual with a very convenient house in the nearby hills; Athena-like Camilla and her twin Charles. Charles drinks too much, but then they all do, including Bunny, the feckless, unreliable odd...
Siri Hustvedt is an impressive new talent. THE BLINDFOLD (Poseidon; $20), her series of tales about an alienated young woman in New York, draws the reader compellingly into the odd consciousness of the narrator and heroine, Iris. Hustvedt's characters are hypnotized by their own dangerous, barely understood impulses. A writer hires Iris to describe the possessions of a girl he thinks he may have murdered. In a later story, Iris dons men's clothing and spends months prowling downtown Manhattan at night, as though drawn onward by the Imp of the Perverse. Relationships, like everything else in Hustvedt...