Word: rootlessly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Long before Watergate confirmed the worst fears of his enemies, Nixon was a perfect model for caricature. Foes saw him as a rootless mutant, sui generis, combining McCarthy's feral atavism with Machiavelli's cunning intellect. Friends perceived him as a courageous champion of basic American values. They remain united in the belief that he suffered a martyr's fate at the hands of the liberal aristocracy whose reign he challenged. For years, Watergate gave the bashers the better of the argument...
This sense of loss appears and reappears in a series of densely detailed flashbacks. It begins when her father, a field naturalist, abandons the lyrical Canadian woods for a university job. She and her brother exchange a "rootless life of impermanence and safety" for the urban wilderness of conformity and cliques. The boy, a prodigy, retreats into a private world of abstruse science and physics. Elaine seeks acceptance by her peers, a gaggle of victimizing girls led by a meanspirited brat named Cordelia. Atwood understands that no subsequent humiliations can ever cut so deep as those of youth. The cruelties...
...TURNER'S COME AND GONE At the Yale Rep and on tour, a shimmering, mysterious depiction of rootless and religiously obsessed blacks in the early 20th century. The best work of August Wilson, the stage's foremost poet of the American black experience, who this year won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony for Fences when it reached Broadway...
...while Soviet officials pull the strings and plot to dismantle the Republic. The economy is such a shambles that people in the once thriving heartland now have to line up for tomatoes. American Gulags have been set up for political opponents, and the countryside is littered with camps of rootless dissidents known as "exiles...
This pose of respectability is part of the joke, of course. Nothing underscores outrageousness better than a no-nonsense manner. Frazier's method reaches an apotheosis of sorts in the title story. Things begin innocently enough: "In today's fast-moving, transient, rootless society, where people meet and make love and part without ever really touching, the relationship every guy already has with his own mother is too valuable to ignore." In arguing that men should start taking a sexual interest in their moms, Frazier, like any responsible essayist, raises possible objections to his plan: "One problem is that lots...