Word: poked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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People in University Hall apparently favored the three-track variety because they would allow students to open their windows and poke tier heads out without having to remove panes of glass. The Massachusetts Hall contingent wanted the cheaper two-track windows...
Nabokov is a brilliant wordsmith and an impressive artificer. If that were enough, Look at the Harlequins! would be a very good book, and as it is, little nabokovs will find it entertaining and, often, funny. Others may find it empty--Nabokov's narrator takes a poke at "readers who are all head," but there is not much pleasure for the heart in this book...
...effort swing his entire dream street, post office, taxis, stray dogs and all, 180° around on the axis of his own mad self. Eventually, obsession invades reality. He walks to the end of a real village street, cannot turn, and falls in a paralytic fit. Thus does Nabokov poke dignified fun at himself. The novel is wholly lighthearted, a sunny absurdity that offers a mocking bow to the author's own worst possibilities, unfollowed bad impulses, and uncracked weak spots. His capering in Russian and French seems more playful than usual, and less pointedly designed to exclude readers...
...lanky, easygoing, well liked. Focusing on the hard legs of show girls and the putty faces of comedians is only his job. His life is with Sandy, their two small sons, and with New York City itself. As an amateur still-photographer, Jay loves to roam the city and poke his lenses into the varied faces of his fellow New Yorkers. Sometimes, when startled out of their reveries, they poke back. At home he arranges his photos on the bed and casually plans to publish them in a book...
...this is more than Roth can handle. The poke at Salinger juts oddly out of place, and the parodies of other writing aren't very funny. For all his frequent flashes of skill, Roth is swinging wildly. He is trying to be winning, trying to disarm our reaction to all the ugliness in Tarnopol's life, trying to get us to laugh it all off. He confronts head-on the inevitable tendency to link novel and author by trying to turn it into yet another novelistic joke, luring us into the connection and then proving how unjustified...