Word: speedboat
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...SPEEDBOAT...
...enough, thank you, about the miseries of Manhattan neurotics. Normally, such convictions are not only sound but healthy; when acted upon, they protect the wary reader from a good deal of gibberish and whining. Still, any critical principle worth holding is also worth ignoring if a good occasion arises. Speedboat-a non-novel novel about Manhattan neurotics-is such an occasion...
...Yorker Journalist Renata Adler's special purview has often been the odd schizophrenia induced in those Americans who came of age (as she did) in the 1950s-a generation that was too young to cheer the System and too old to blow it up. The seven stories in Speedboat, though cast as fiction, really form an extended reporter's notebook on the same story: the many ways that agreeable, hypereducated people find to go slowly bonkers...
...since turned in a score of world-record performances. Arguably the best woman swimmer of all time, she explodes from the starting block with such force that she is often 3 feet ahead of the field when heads break water. She dives shallow and planes high like a speedboat, with much of her body out of the water. Her motion is so efficient-though not stylish-that she is able to set world records while taking substantially fewer strokes per minute than the women she leaves in her wake. After the Olympics, Ender may retire and next year begin pediatric...
Without Maps. That the refugees have survived at all seems to many a personal miracle. For example, while Saigon was being shelled, one Vietnamese army colonel picked up his wife and daughter, pirated a small speedboat still in the racks at the city's Club Nautique, took them down the Mekong River and out to sea, where they were rescued. His daughter's husband, Pham Van Tinh, a Vietnamese air force pilot, escaped separately from Tan Son Nhut airbase. Under heavy fire, he made a dash for a twin-engine cargo plane, shot the lock off the door...