Word: petered
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Final Placement Syndrome is "what the ordinary sociologist calls 'success.' " Freud's theory that frustration arises from foibles such as penis envy, the Oedipus complex or the castration complex is nonsense, says Peter, who cheerfully regards Freud as a "satirist at heart." On the contrary, "frustration occurs as a result of promotion," because most people who are promoted genuinely wish to be productive...
Staticmanship is the way to avoid the disastrous final promotion. It is a stratagem summed up by the classic injunction: "Cobbler, stick to your last." Peter himself, author of two serious books on disturbed children, thinks that one way he has avoided rising to final placement himself is by turning down lucrative consulting offers. This is known as Peter's Parry, and he admits that if most people employed it they would be nagged to distraction by their wives. A more practical technique is Creative Incompetence, or "creating the impression that you have already reached your level of incompetence...
...Peter ends his book with the hope that a philanthropist will soon endow a chair of hierarchiology at a major university. "I am ready for the post," he says, "having proven myself capable in my present endeavors...
...roman-fleuve lies in keeping track of the pasts and permutations of vast numbers of characters. One way and another, the war introduces and eradicates many of Powell's figurants. The ditching of the Yugoslav Chetnik Leader Mihailovich in favor of Tito costs the life of Peter Templer, one of Jenkins' oldest friends (and a veteran of novel No. 1, A Question of Upbringing), who fought with the wrong partisans. The Malayan debacle takes another of Powell's veteran characters, Charles Stringham, P.O.W. and presumed dead. The officer indirectly responsible for the orders that killed both...
There are those who see the aggiornamento of Pope John XXIII as an erosion of the ancient rock of St. Peter, and those who see it as nothing less than a revival of all Christendom. It was likely that sooner or later these conflicting views would be explored in fiction; it is only strange that the first credible and moving novelistic exposition of the crisis of faith among clergy and laity that followed Vatican II should come out of Australia...