Word: roberte
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...going on four decades, they've been the odd couple of Method movie stars: implosive vs. explosive, compressed energy and showboating showmanship. Robert De Niro caught our eye and kept it by being watchful, a figure of static electricity, a hoarder of his characters' motives. He did more by seeming to do nothing. Al Pacino was the total opposite: he laid it all on the table. Then he sliced it up, gobbled it down and spat it out. Before leaving the room, he'd scream at the table, smash it to pieces and use one of the splinters to pick...
Home is a pendant to Gilead, or maybe a reverse-angle instant replay of it: both books are set in the 1950s in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, and are concerned with many of the same characters and events. Robert Boughton, an elderly Presbyterian minister, is dying. A widower and father of eight, Boughton's powers are fading, though he is still full of a shaky heartiness that causes him to end most of his sentences with an exclamation point. His daughter Glory, unmarried in her late 30s, has come home to take care of him, partly because...
Soon another bird returns to the nest: Robert's prodigal son Jack. (What else would he be named?) Jack is a notoriously unemployable drunkard who in his youth stole prolifically, then fathered a child out of wedlock, then fled Gilead. He hasn't been back in 20 years. "I failed as a lowlife," he cracks. "But not for want of--application." A tender, troubled soul, Jack feels desperately guilty about his misdeeds, but at the same time he finds his family's Christian forgiveness unbearable. Glory and Robert are furious with Jack, but at the same time they ache with...
There are grand things in Home. Perfect things, even. The way that Gilead is both idyll and prison to Glory, the birthplace of all her hopes and their tomb. Robert's long, ungraceful dive into death--"Jesus never had to be old," he complains. But the problem of Jack leaves a slackness at the heart of the book, and Robinson never takes it in. Two-thirds of the way through, you're desperate for Jack and Glory to fall into bed together, even if they are brother and sister, just as a gesture of Christian charity toward a reader starved...
Faculty of Arts and Sciences spokesman Robert P. Mitchell said that the occasion brings the black community into one place “so that our African-American students can identify and see and meet and greet and chat with black faculty and administrators...