Word: schine
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...Schine has an ear for authentic dialogue, especially the argot of the intelligentsia. The Washington-New York-Cambridge axis constitutes an arena for combatants to engage in calculated sparring. Schine proves to be a deft chronicler of the idiosyncracies of the tenured classes...
Margaret is married to the 40-year old Edward, who reads like a single neurotic New Yorker's idea of the perfect man. Not only is he English, but he is handsome, forbearing, and a Columbia professor, possessed of the ultimate academic credential...an Oxford degree. (Had Schine made him a few years older, he might have known Bill Clinton at Oxford and been able to take advantage of his status as an FOB, instead of languishing in a faculty office at Columbia...
Margaret is currently working on another book, which shares the title of Schine's text, Rameau's Niece. This is the ultimate post-modern text, since it is lifted almost entirely from works of prominent philosophers of the time, such as Helvetius, Kant and naturally, Diderot. The text (within the text) is filled with double entendre about a young woman's sexual coming of age and search for enlightenment...
...Schine continues in a tradition exemplified by Joyce Carol Oates' Black Water and Auberon Waugh's waspish commentary for the Spectator. All attribute numerous undesirable traits to the young people who populate their work. These unfortunates are uniformly slothful, vain, banal, (place your vice here) revealing that while these authors may have read about and taught young people, they may not actually know any young people...
...undergraduates who populate Schine's novel (while admittedly peripheral characters) are stereotypes and crudely drawn, veritable tabulae rasae, empty vessels, waiting to receive wisdom. In this artificial undergraduate universe, all the women have flawless skin, long shiny hair and are transparently in love with their instructors...