Word: seem
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mallon attempts to relieve the tedium of his stereotypical plot by creating exaggerated characters who often seem more ridiculous than humorous. Mallon's penchant for defying convention, if even in the most conventional of ways, is evident in his intentional mangling of the names of Harvard buildings. Sever Hall is reincarnated as Cleaver, and Warren House is transposed to Warble House...
Although he may imitate the technique of better writers by using such allusions, here they seem out of place and forced. And his claim that the book is harmless and silly hardly conforms to the highbrow tone of the work, leaving his attempt at juggling knowledge of the literary with techniques of mass culture unsuccessful...
...exaggeration and somewhat cavalier regard for reality that Mallon displays in Arts and Sciences help to brighten a novel with a potentially depressing theme. Mallon says his novel is "really intended as light entertainment." "There's a great element of silliness in the book," but that "does seem to go along with the territory...
...disprove physical theory by proposing the existence of "pure information" in addition to matter and energy. This information provides the foundation for morphic fields and allows them to persist undiminished through time and space. Though he offers a few tests of this theory. Sheldrake explains away outcomes that would seem to disprove his proposal. He himself is extremely credulous, gleeful that his ideas allow for telepathy, reincarnation, collective memory and the like. With his formative causation, it seems, anything goes, and the details expand and contract into every corner of the scientific edifice...
...treads the narrow line between insanity and sainthood with all the fey grace that could be desired. As she floats across the stage, she resembles nothing so much as an unnaturally ethereal pre-Raphaelite saint, with her haze of red hair and huge desperate eyes. Her feet scarcely seem to touch the ground. She appears moored to the earth by only the most fragile of bonds, ready at the slightest inclination to cast off her moorings and soar off the stage. It is perhaps fortunate for all concerned that her costume is as heavy...