Word: phantasms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What’s particularly tragic about this situation is that this myth of the “heartland” ethic is by and large a phantasm constructed by conservative elites in order to frighten liberals away from drifting towards populism. In reality, rural America has been the site of some of the nation’s most radical political movements. Eugene Debs, the prominent socialist of the turn of the century, was a proud resident of Terre Haute, Ind. Lyndon Johnson, the architect of the century’s most far-reaching liberal programs, was born a poor...
...conflicted as the story calls for; she is simply petulant and whiny, cajoling the reader for desiring a resolution that he shouldn’t even want or need. The book would be better if Phillips had cut out the last section and left the novel as a phantasm, a hauntress, a gleam of something mysterious, intriguing, and not so finally resolved and inarticulate. The meat of the novel has momentum, has life and potential to be what it can be: haunting and thought-provoking. But the ending is fumbling, unappealing, as Phillips summarizes every potential cause for the events...
...Kirk (see sidebar) is heartbreaking but fierce as he rages against the dying of the light, the fecklessness of his lover and the implacability of the angel's demands. And Jeffrey Wright--re-creating his Tony-winning roles as Belize, a Hispanic African-American transvestite, and Mr. Lies, a phantasm of Harper's drug reveries--is a model of nuance in parts that could have been mere sounding boards for Angels' agonized white folks...
...promise, this will all be over--the endlessly reiterated accusations and the emphatically repeated denials, the circumlocutions of shameless hirelings and the tut-tutting of editorialists in the Washington Post and the New York Times. All of it gone, vanished, poof!--as if it were a dream or a phantasm...