Word: robyn
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...turn around a laggard steel-parts factory in Rummidge -- "an imaginary city," the author informs us, "which occupies, for the purposes of fiction, the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps of the so-called real world." Vic's antagonist (and here the term is literal) is Robyn Penrose, an attractive, rigorously feminist lecturer in literature at the local university -- a specialist in the 19th century industrial novel, no less. To bolster her chance of a permanent appointment, Robyn goes along with a university scheme to shadow Vic's movements for one day a week in the interests...
...which is predictable -- but not too predictable. Lodge is a writer who seems to favor schematic setups precisely because they enable him to play sly variations on the formulas. Left-wing Robyn, for example, decries Vic's factory as a hellish model of capitalism in extremis and dismisses his maneuvers against rival companies as "a lot of little dogs squabbling over bones." Yet while tagging along to a trade show in Frankfurt, she can't resist helping him bring off a negotiating coup for a piece of automatic machinery that will replace several workers. Vic charges that Robyn's scholarly...
Lodge takes care to keep these two evenly matched, each as disconcertingly perceptive and sweetly ridiculous as the other. Sexually, it is Robyn who is the lighthearted aggressor and Vic who, after spending a single night with her, turns into a love-sick calf and begins making alarming declarations about leaving his "podge" of a wife. Robyn, ever the teacher, expounds poststructuralist literary theory to him in bed, explaining that what he mistakes for love is merely a rhetorical device, a bourgeois fallacy. "Haven't you ever been in love, then?" he asks. "When I was younger," she replies...
...Robyn Gray, 27, an Atlanta accountant, benefited from a different type of aid. The single parent of a two-year-old daughter, she obtained a mortgage through a program that local bankers set up last year after a newspaper charged that the lenders were deliberately redlining -- or boycotting -- Atlanta's black communities. After hunting for a year for an affordable home in a pleasant neighborhood, Gray took out a 9.25% fixed-rate mortgage. Even then she needed help from her parents to make the $2,500 down payment on her $50,000, three-bedroom home. But without the bank program...
...home of senior writer David Brand, who wrote both the main story and the accompanying article on nutrition. Brand became so intrigued by the topic that he began to analyze the cholesterol content of all the meals his family ate. "That nearly drove my daughters Leslie and Robyn crazy," he recalls. "They accused me of ruining every meal and wanted to ban the subject altogether." Never an autocrat at the table, Brand capitulated in the interest of domestic peace...