Word: rat
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...spent her days at a desk waiting for the phone calls that rarely came and reading anything she could get her hands on. "I just sat there and read. It wasn't that bad. It was just boring," she says. But after several weeks of life in the rat race, Debbie quit to become a beach...
...Last week WCPO reported that Harvey admitted to police he killed 34 people: 23 patients at Drake, five at a local Veterans Administration hospital where he used to work, and six others. Most were described as elderly and ailing. His methods, according to the report, ranged from cyanide, arsenic, rat poison or cleaning fluid to suffocation with a plastic bag or pillow. Police have refused to comment on the case, pending completion of the grand jury investigation...
...mere nine days later, a Harvard shuttle bus loaded with children burst into flames on a different Massachusetts interstate. Thanks to the driver, who heard funny noises coming from the engine and evacuated the vehicle, no one was on the Harvard-owned rat trap (which regularly transports students to and from the Quad and Mather House) when it blew...
This news spurs the narrator first into denial ("No, She-rat, no! . . . We're still alive and kicking") and then into a frenzy of storytelling ("an attempt to put off the end with words"). He resuscitates Oskar of The Tin Drum, now nearing 60 and the head of a film and videocassette production company, and sends him on a trip to Poland to attend his grandmother's 107th birthday party. He revives the plot and premise of The Flounder and sets five women in charge of a sailing barge on the Baltic Sea, ostensibly testing for the stultification of that...
Whenever these diversionary tales threaten to get interesting, the She-rat interrupts with further animadversions against Homo sapiens. The narrator complains, "Her talk, that nasal piping, grumbling, muttering, went on and on." Indeed it does, drowning everything, including patience, in a sea of recrimination and invective. The preachiness of The Rat ultimately grows fatiguing and self-negating. If the human race is truly as pigheaded and suicidal as it is portrayed here, then such a book will only add to the "garbage mountain" from which the She-rat speaks her eulogy...