Word: prig
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Barbara Novak (Renee Zellweger), author of the best-selling semifeminist screed Down with Love, is on a collision course with rakish journalist Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor). She thinks he's a pig; he thinks she's a prig. Abetted by their respective editors, Vikki Hiller (Sarah Paulson) and Peter MacMannus (David Hyde Pierce), they parry, gavotte and dissemble: Catcher pretends to be a rube astronaut; Barbara pretends to be...well, we can't give away the plot...
Which doesn't mean Delbanco is a prig. When he venerates Puritans, it's not because they were moralists but because, as his research suggests, they were more searching than self-assured, believing "that the self without God is helpless" and yet finding themselves in this confusing, isolating new land. For Delbanco, the most important thing we have lost in our age of detached sardonicism isn't morality but moral curiosity, the search for the meanings of good and evil in our confusing times...