Word: rogin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...word that has to be looked up to be appreciated. "Velleity: volition in its weakest form." Rogin applies it proudly and neatly to his man Singer, a magazine writer becalmed somewhere around 40. Although his outlook is "upper-middle-class, Upper West Side...
...mean Singer, the anti-hero of Gilbert Rogin's new comic novel, whose wife peeks out shyly from under the closet door while he ponders what his life, if any, may mean...
...Questioner and answerer resolve themselves into two halves of the Bemused Reader, who finds himself in the bathroom-where Rogin's characters seem to spend a good deal of time -staring into the mirror and mouthing the same word over and over again until it empties of meaning: "Velleity. Velleity. Velleity...
Under the Bed. Take three fixed points: Philip Roth. John Cheever, Peter De Vries. Rogin is somewhere in the triangle they describe, nearer to Cheever than the others. Rogin shares Cheever's awareness of risk, his sense that to turn a corner of the banal may be to find oneself in a howling waste of strangeness...
This astringent strangeness allows Rogin to clown outrageously without losing control. Singer's parents invade his bedchamber one Sunday morning. His wife finds the conversation unproductive and resettles herself under the bed. The conversation continues, and then Singer gets out of bed and joins his wife. Zooey Glass and his mother come to mind. The slapstick works as well for Rogin as it did for Salinger...