Word: pincus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Ground zero is Boston and its environs, which Lelchuk turns into a combination Sodom and St. Petersburg on the eve of the Russian Revolution. His characters even faction off nicely into modern American equivalents of Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and Nihilists, with Lenny Pincus, a subway Trotsky from Brooklyn, hopelessly trying to keep two feet in all three camps...
...Pincus is an ex-student at Cardoza College (read Brandeis, where Lelchuk teaches English). But the first half of the book belongs to Pincus' former teacher Bernard Kovell, the school's 35-year-old humanities dean. By day Kovell is the model liberal, upholding the life of the mind and responsibility to the commonweal. By night he juggles his "family" of six girl friends. Most of the girls have an illustrative neurosis. But after more than 100 pages of Kovell's describing his curative powers in tedious Deep Throat detail, it is time to reconsider H.L. Mencken...
Compared with Kovell, Pincus is a puritan. He seems satisfied with joylessly initiating one 14-year-old virgin and watching her take up with heroin. Pincus' passion is for revolution and cultivating flowers of evil from all the standard humanities-department seed catalogues. He is an organizer of the destruction of art in local museums and the burning of Harvard's Widener Library. He kills Mailer, further extending those justifications for hell raising that Mailer himself borrowed from Dostoevsky, Baudelaire...
...next step for Pincus and his guerrilla band of young suburban terrorists and ghetto scholarship dropouts is to kidnap ten of the nation's leading intellectuals. Here Lelchuk plays it safe by identifying them only as A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and Kovell. The plan is to "de-mandarinize" the elders at a secret New Hampshire hideout. This promising situation is not fulfilled with much imagination or wit. Pincus' fate is equally drab: prison, where he is reduced to suffering from a chronic earache...
Follow-Up Failure. Freelance Journalist Walter Pincus, writing in New York magazine, blamed the Washington press corps for not taking high officials to task on Indochina policy. Its "failure to follow up," he declared, assured the Administration "that there was to be no penalty for putting out misleading information." Washington Pamphleteer I.F. Stone praised the press for revealing the Pentagon papers, but added: "We wish they had started earlier." One defense applicable to both press and officialdom came from John Roche in the New Leader: "History is a very different thing when you are approaching it head-on rather than...