Word: pifer
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CIRCLE OF WOMEN by Drury L. Pifer. 335 pages. Doubleday...
Sometimes Novelist Pifer sneaks glances at his metaphors like a new-hatched press agent admiring his first pair of $60 shoes. But this boyishness is not offensive: he can write almost as well as he thinks...
...Pifer's literary fancy is a ring of courtesans organized by a shadowy group of sinners to pry cashable secrets out of the military-industrial complex. His hero is a plausible young fastmouth, Tom Habba-kuk-named somewhat pretentiously after a 7th century B.C. minor prophet -who has been recruited to shill for the vestals, as the girls are called. He turns out to be very good...
...Pifer puts it this way: "When morning comes with the soldiery abed and tangled in a heap, the bathtub gin drained, leaving only a rosy residue of secretaries in half-slips, when the muddy colonel in the geranium bush is dragged indoors by dawn's first Negro to sleep it off in the vestibule under a smashed grandfather clock, when first brightness crashes through ripped drapes into the dehydrated eyes of snockered politicos, lobbyists in underpants, Pentagon sources and the secret police, when the hands that guide our collective destiny reach to kill the screams of the alarm clock...
Allen received a measure of the magnitude of his job when President Nixon's task force on education, headed by Carnegie Corporation President Alan Pifer, presented its report urging massive federal spending of up to $1 billion a year to save city schools. Even if he can pry that kind of money out of Congress, Allen is not likely to find much agreement on just how it is to be used. But bets are that whatever his eventual budget, James Allen will wind up spending the money...