Word: roth
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Quayle kept pounding away at Bayh's liberal record, reminding voters of their state's almost 12% unemployment rate, and calling for the Kemp-Roth 30% tax cut. Quayle accused Bayh of wanting to "spend, spend, spend our way to prosperity." He added: "If that were true, New York would be the most prosperous city in the country...
...imperfect society. But that consensus began to falter in the late 1960s, when Americans chose Richard Nixon, and in 1972, when they chose him again, emphatically. Watergate intervened, throwing an election to the Democrats. But then came Proposition 13, and inevitably behind it Ronald Reagan, the Kemp-Roth tax cut, an end to the Environmental Protection Agency, the death of the Equal Rights Amendment, a one-sided partnership between business and government. In short, the restoration of the same American dream that once made tranquil the sleep of Calvin Coolidge but haunted Herbert Hoover...
Some variation of this philosophy rests behind most of Roth's and Elkin's best work: The worst is yet to be, so watch out. The disasters that befall Roth heroes are chiefly sexual; well-educated, pampered men, they try to be moral and high-minded while writhing as passion's play things. Expecting life to resemble "high art," they are constantly outraged to find themselves crawling through "low actuality." A scene from the marriage of Maureen and Peter Tarnopol in My Life as a Man is screamingly typical: "Then, on hands and knees, she crawled into...
...miscues and misfortune that these books portray, they nonetheless inspire elation, the thrill of watching craftsmen work with words. Roth and Elkin are both superb monologists, comic sprinters, which is one reason why excerpts from their longer works still seem satisfyingly self-contained. Roth describes himself as a child with "one foot in col lege, the other in the Catskills," and the Borscht Belt routine is what his first-person narrators constantly imitate, no matter how much they want to sound like Chekhov or Henry James. Elkin's characters are prone to bursts of speechmaking, and their creator...
Much more can be hoped for from Roth, 47, and Elkin, 50. Questions remain: Come on, Roth, will guys ever cope with sex and guilt successfully? Hey, Elkin, is there life after the Apocalypse? For now, these two books offer splendid ways to pass the time while waiting for the answers...