Word: ratting
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...advance press for the new book by Russell Banks (HarperCollins; 390 pages; $22) tries hard to pass the novel off as the story of a Huck Finn-esque mall rat in upstate New York. Unfortunately, it was a lot easier to be an American archetype when Huck and Jim floated down the Mississippi, a ready-made metaphor. It's a much more difficult, and much less interesting, trick for Bone, the 14 year old narrator of this book, who's stuck not with a river but a mere shopping mall, a place whereTIME book critic John Skowsays "you can sort...
...Meanwhile, less than a mile away, more than 200 Haitian children lounge listlessly under drab green tents, seeking refuge from the harsh midday sun. Camp Nine, their home since last June, is a desolate patch of cactus-filled desert where the only sign of life is an occasional banana rat or iguana. A fence encircles the camp, which is guarded by American soldiers. The children, many of them orphans, have languished in this dusty purgatory for nearly a year. Despite the efforts of immigrants' rights groups, only a few of the Haitian minors -- who range in age from infants...
...therefore a kind of guru to artists who seek gnomic "enactments" of pain, are obsessed by splits between private and public identity--including their own feelings of victimization--and treat the body as canvas. Not for nothing does one of Nauman's video pieces feature a bewildered rat in a Plexiglas maze, scuttling about under the bombardment of rock drumming. It's Nauman's idea of the relationship between artist and audience. The artist as hero is long gone from American culture, and the artist as social critic is ineffective, but Nauman, with the example of Dada before...
Motel Blues is a series of episodes in the lives of photographer Jarred (Jay Heath) and his vapid girlfriend Flee (Angelina Zappia), who have travelled to a remote rat-trap hotel in the desert so that Jarred can complete a project. It quickly becomes clear, however, that their relationship is strained and distrustful; the ugly monotony of their surroundings matches the emptiness of their bizarre conversations The strain is increased by Jarred's evident contempt for Flee's favorite activities, reading fashion magazines and eating junk food...
Douglas' dense, rat-a-tat-tat narrative is full of surprises. Few readers probably know that Samuel Goldwyn once offered Freud $100,000 to write a "love story" for his movie studio. Sometimes Douglas gets her details wrong. Gertrude Stein's famous tautology ("Rose is a rose is a rose"), for example, does not begin with "A," as the book quotes it. But these are minor flaws in an erudite portrait of a dazzling decade and metropolis, both of which had a sense "of having been a specially privileged and charged site of American experience.'' We shall not see their...