Word: pokes
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...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...
...that the vitality and excitement of the place will remain intact. This is why the museum is such a key element in the plan. It will provide warm memories and the feeling of his presence, almost as if he is actually there, guaranteeing large numbers of people to poke around and keep the place alive. Two million people a year. One is tempted to conjecture in all this that the memorial is really being designed by a committee of aging advance men who think that the measure of President Kennedy's greatness in history will depend on the size...
...story is a poke-in-the-ribs at the absurd histrionics of the Bliss family (a quasi-retired actress, her hack-writing husband, and their two long-suffering children) who invite four similarly foolish characters for a weekend in the English countryside. The plot unravels with the reception and treatment of the guests, and winds up with the visitors making a furtive escape after one memorable night...