Word: smalling
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...rate of $2.95 an hour. "I don't like the work, which is dull and boring," he says, "but on my salary I have been able to marry, rent a small apartment...
...pounded his fist on the table and barked that "good faith" had been "shattered" by the Israeli decision to allow its citizens to purchase land on the West Bank. Israeli Minister of the Interior Yosef Burg sarcastically retorted that the Egyptians were "using a big gun to shoot a small bird...
...small cars. We have some big cars, but really our problem is that we haven't built enough gas guzzlers. That is where the money is, for the same reason that in a meat market there is a bigger margin on steak than on hamburger...
What happened? The first clue appears on the title page, where the word LETTERS is built up from a welter of small letters that, when properly viewed, spell the following: "an old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers each of which imagines himself actual." Letters made up of letters, fiction made up of fictions, Chinese boxes diminishing to emptiness. Such diminution is what the novel is about. The 772 pages that follow thus constitute a stunningly obsessive exercise in inflatio ad absurdum...
Mathematically, McKay's reckonings are right. But his plans to establish a thriving humstead naturally go wrong, and this is the matter of Thomas McMahon's fine, small, funny second novel. McMahon is a professor of applied mechanics and biology at Harvard. Nine years ago. he wrote Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry: A Novel. It told of a teen-age boy growing up among the scientists at Los Alamos. N. Mex., as they calculated their way toward the atomic bomb. Here the author sets his sights backward by 100 years to spoof the pre-Darwinian notion of nature...