Word: randomizes
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Thanks God for J. Crew catalogues. After a hard days work of battling sleep, it's time to rev up those engines. Sex, drugs, alcohol are the main hobbies, though any sort of rambunctious behavior will do. Wantonness is key. Any random hook-ups are always welcome, too. Who doesn't love an emotional crisis in the aftermath? Party 'till the cows come home. So how does one become lonely in a hip, happenin' place like this? Well, don't forget, there are still those prudes like me who refuse to be swept up by the illusory excitement...
Elizabeth Strout tests the strength of that umbilical bond in her first novel, Amy and Isabelle (Random House; 304 pages; $22.95). In the small New England town of Shirley Falls, Isabelle Goodrow is a single mother with a shameful secret: her daughter Amy, 16, is illegitimate. As if in atonement for her youthful fling, Isabelle is now, in her early 30s, the image of propriety, maintaining perfect posture and an immaculate French twist. She craves respectability but is too poor for the upper echelon of Shirley Falls and too proud to befriend her co-workers at the mill. Amy shares...
...polling on that one--three adults, chosen at random toward the end of Christmas dinner...
...because the original DNA has been torn into so many random bits of genetic gibberish (as opposed to the predictable fragments made by gene-cutting enzymes), scientists need powerful computers to determine where the tiny fragments overlap. This is tough enough when you're sequencing a small part of a chromosome. But now Smith urged Venter to try it out, not merely on a strip of DNA but on an entire genome. He proposed Haemophilus influenzae, a bacterium that causes ear infections and meningitis. Until then, only a few small viruses, whose genomes had tens of thousands of genetic letters...
This is the conspiracy theorist's tempting conceit, the assumption that someone is behind all the awful events in the world. The true terror is, of course, that no one is, and we live in a world of random horror. Still, the premise is intriguing. Unfortunately, it gets spoilt by Ellis' penchant for proper nouns. For a book whose main character is so desperately au courant, the anachronisms and inaccuracies are enough to disturb. References are still made to the late Michael Hutchence, Winona Ryder still dates Dave Pirner, and the de rigeur Startac cellphone is misspelled. A deeper problem...