Word: second-person
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...stupor at the Palladium, staring at a skinheaded female bartender who's asking him what's wrong. "You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning," an overvoice tells us, quoting the first line of McInerney's second-person account...
...McInerney's first novel, Bright Lights, Big City, assumed cult status within months of publication. Its second-person narrative, cast of cocaine- fueled yuppies and New York City nightclub scenes had an odd, ironic charm that made some 138,000 buyers eager for his next tale. This time the protagonist has upward immobility but no interest in drugs. In fact, Christopher Ransom, an American drifter in Kyoto, has only one enthusiasm: karate. He hangs out at Hormone Derange, a cowboy store, and tries to regain his spiritual bearings with martial arts. Ransom also wants to avoid memories of a girlfriend...
...Testing Trap, however, does not discuss. It asserts. Everything about it is combative, from its chapter headings ("Branding Children--Closing College Doors--Narrowing Graduate Opportunites--Blocking Access to Licensed Professions") to its singsong polemical style. Strenio writes in a conversational second-person manner laced heavily with rhetorical devices. ("You've heard of setting the fox to guard the hens?") and breaks frequently into first-person to stress-a point or tell a sad little story about a friend ruined by low scores--sprinkling his pages with "I think" and "It seems to me" in the fashion that English teachers work...
With Pietro Nenni, clever leader of the fellow-traveling Socialists (75 seats), De Gasperi had his longest talk. The two spoke with the intimate second-person "tu" a reminder of the days they spent together as wartime anti-Fascist refugees in the Vatican. Of course, said Nenni, he did not expect De Gasperi to denounce the North Atlantic pact, but was it necessary to show such "excessive zeal" in promoting it? De Gasperi asked if Nenni's Socialists are really as independent of Togliatti's Reds as they profess. Replied Nenni frankly: if the Communists were to take...