Word: outward
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...certainly falls short. She knows this risk and consistently runs it anyhow. Her obsession remains the untidy world where everyone actually lives, where headlines daily scream out the unthinkable and where nice people find themselves behaving in ways they can barely imagine, much less condone. The McCulloughs' marriage, despite outward appearances, is far from perfect; the author deftly reveals the stresses and fault lines that have built up over the years. But these problems do not lead logically to what Ian calls "this sudden terrible fury that has ruined our lives." These people have not earned and do not deserve...
...that empire. Historic Russian expansionism, the Marxist-Leninist ideology of global class conflict, and a Kremlin mind-set that security can come only through the insecurity of adversaries have combined to create a nation whose defensive instincts can be frighteningly offensive. In his speech, Gorbachev proposed to preclude any "outward-oriented use of force," a phrase that nicely captures the essence of Soviet military policy since World War II. More important were his promised troop cuts, not just their numbers but their nature. The West has long insisted that any conventional-forces agreement requires the Soviets to reconfigure their troops...
...always with Gurney, an outward simplicity conceals a puzzle hunter's trove of puns, metaphors and hidden allusions. In the opening scene, the father misquotes a literary reference and the son, in gentle correction, claims that Coleridge said the three great plots were Oedipus Rex, Tom Jones and Volpone. Sure enough, the play turns out to be, like Oedipus, a struggle between father and son; the play within a play hinges, like Tom Jones, on questions of hidden parenthood; and the father, like Volpone, proclaims his forthcoming death to see what favors can be extracted in the hope of inheritance...
...history of literature. (This story decidedly did not appear in The New Yorker.) For page after page a Harvard undergraduate named Wiley tries to bring his stubbornly unresponsive girlfriend to orgasm: "The whitish bubbling, the splash of her discontinuous physical response: those waves, ah, that wake rose, curled outward, bubbled, and fell. Rose, curled outward, bubbled, and fell." Little in this prose marathon is particularly erotic or offensive; it is possible for long periods of time to forget entirely what is supposed to be going on. The point of the exercise seems to be verbal ingenuity, coupled with the message...
...outward calm is deceptive. The individual investor has been driven away, and a sense of unease is still felt. People are right to feel uneasy: practically nothing has been done to prevent a recurrence of October...