Word: rinsler
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Englander Kenneth Mackenzie Coffin, a young Wasp of means, qualms and wavering commitment to the New Left; Coffin's brilliant wife Marcy, a nice enough Texas girl caught in the coils of biology and history, who is not unfairly described as "a graduate student of herself; and Rinsler, a cynical organizer for The Movement. A reader soon finds, though, that all three tend to talk (and think) like a John Leonard review. Here is Rinsler inwardly fulminating at "Melville's bourgeois psychodrama ... Ahab as entrepreneur cum zealot ... Babbitt redux; whale oil poured on troubled waters." Groans Marcy enduring...
Intellectual Fix. No one should be too much put off. The book's quip-filled tirades, like Shaw's prefaces, provide a splendid intellectual fix on the drama. Coffin temporarily leaves his wife and children, as well as Rinsler's movement, which proves as unscrupulous as any Establishment organ. He then tries to practice one-on-one enlightenment as straw boss to a crew of black migrant apple pickers on his ancestral New Hampshire estate. The results are hilarious but depressing...
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