Word: radiantly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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THIS NOVEL, MARGARET DRABble's 12th, concludes an ambitious project that the author began with The Radiant Way (1987) and continued in A Natural Curiosity (1989). Essentially, Drabble has been trying to counter the solipsistic bent of so much contemporary fiction, that wan parade of heroes and heroines talking to themselves -- usually about themselves -- and deaf to anything beyond the echoes of self-consciousness. Novels, particularly Victorian triple-deckers, once made room for the outside world, for the ways that history, politics, economics, etc., impinged on the lives of ordinary people. Are such narratives impossible now, or have most novelists...
...solar professional; he installs solar heating systems in houses. Jim spoke to us in the technical language of solar contracting. He spoke of structural attachment points, insulated thermal blinds, weather surfaces, triple glazed window systems, release temperature, mean-radiant temperature, stick-framing, R-factors, maintenance-free super-insulated maximum-efficiency collectors, and unstratified heat...
...solar panels up on the roof, and flows down to this thermal bank. An industrial computer listens to thermometers throughout the house and controls a pump which sends hot water to cool places. The water flows through a rubber tube under the strips of metal that Jim called "radiant." The water warms the radiant, and the radiant warms the room...
...with us again; he had done the solar work here as well. By this point I had had about enough lecturing on solar power for one day. There was the same copper tank in the basement and the same talk about thermal efficiency, floor radiant and sweat equity...
...aesthetic identity. Like a priestess, in passages of beautiful island incantation, she conjures her Cuban heritage from a land between "death and oblivion," so that she too can fasten on Abuela Celia's drop pearl earrings, sit in a wicker swing by the sea, and watch as the radiant spirits of her forefathers "stretch out a colossal hand...