Word: patchwork
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Anne Tyler is one of the few contemporary authors whose work consistently attracts both critical acclaim and scads of paying readers. Those curious about how this trick is performed--a category that must include nearly every other writer on earth--would do well to consult A Patchwork Planet (Knopf; 288 pages; $24), Tyler's 14th novel. This new book not only conforms to the familiar pattern the author has established in her fiction but does so in a fresh and engaging fashion...
...kitschy glass lights look like upturned jellyfish. Ceramic armadillos and alligators play musical instruments. Yet, while from the waist up the restaurant exudes kitsch, from the waist down Magnolias looks like a diner: white tile floors and vinyl seat covers. The Glass Menagerie effect is heightened by the patchwork clown dolls and Mardi Gras beads strewn copiously around the small, intimate dining room...
...automobile, the motion picture, the radio, Hadden and Luce detected a new consumers' appetite for motion, stimulation, variety. Traditional sources of information had become inadequate. Newspapers were local or regional and in any case offered only a patchwork of information. Magazines tended to be specialized, with a tendency toward fat and bloviation; they rarely offered news as news. None even set out to be comprehensive on a national and international scale...
Each ethnic group is a square in the multicultural patchwork that is Harvard, each with its own bright colors and designs. Nguyen, in his attack on the "self-segregation" of ethnic groups on campus, attempts to mute the brilliance of our individual colors by blending them together into a banal, uniform fusion--and he does this, ironically enough, in the name of multiculturalism. BETH A. GOLDSTEIN...
...Nino would also bestow a patchwork of benefits. Off Chile, fishermen could look forward to catching anchovies normally found much farther north. Peruvians have been enjoying balmy beaches in the middle of their winter. And residents of the U.S. could look forward to fewer Atlantic Ocean hurricanes, an earlier spring in the Northeast and a blessed lull in tornadoes throughout the Midwest. All things considered, says Florida State University oceanographer James O'Brien, Americans should think of El Nino as a "good dude...