Word: rayed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...will like your father better than you like me. Hell, for a long time I liked him better than me and that was after living with him better part of a year, which doesn't exactly endear people to you as a rule (ask around)." Poor Cora, she alienates Ray with her cynical humor and is left to the less interesting two-thirds of Delusions...
...readers, however, we aren't all that upset to see Ray go. Fisher gets too gooey with her language when she's in love and treads dangerously close to being laughable. "The idea of him did not loom larger, but the reality, the quiet force of him, stole into her sideways one night when she lay next to him and made its hungry home there...
Cora is funnier when she is keeping her distance from Ray. It is really too bad though, that she never works things out, because we feel always as if resolution is possible and that Ray could be good from her (in spite of the goo) if only she would grow...
...slow death of William from AIDS is supposed to be transformative for Ray and Cora. William shows up as the relationship disintegrates and both relationship and William proceed to die. Rather than stirring immediate sympathy, the introduction of William is awkward because he has hardly been mentioned before and is promptly given center stage. Fisher can't really handle such a big topic, and William serves mainly to delay the finality of Ray and Cora's split...
...train, with Cora searching for meaning, things start to fall apart. We know, because we're at the end of the book, that the feeling of incompleteness about Ray is all we're going to get. We are still confused by the whole episode with William--surely his death was more than just a stall tactic? Even her jokes are starting to falter ("Berth and birth--she attempted to wrangle the words into a suitable pun, but nothing come.") And now Fisher has given us another invalid to contend with, the unsympathetic, addled Grandpa...