Word: suburban
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Picking up the story after Conrad returns home, Ms. Guest deals with love and hate, forgiveness and the lack of it, madness and death-the themes appropriate to Greek tragedy. But she must deal with them in the terms of the well-made suburban novel. Panic equals the rattle of father's ice cube in one-too-many martinis. Despair equals the hundred small ways a Christmas Day falls apart, even when the keys to a new Le Mans for Conrad lie under the tree. Loneliness gets spelled out in the instructions on a frozen TV dinner...
...ending more smooth than convincing. As a novelist who warns against the passion for safety and order that is no passion at all, Guest illustrates as well as describes the problem. She is neat and ordered, even at explaining that life is not neat and ordered. Thus the suburban novel takes on the manicured-lawn aspects of its subject; and in its well-lighted game rooms the characters seem like padded billiard balls, they carom so discreetly...
...fixing. Koco has installed new plumbing, paneling, siding and decorative brick. On one wall hangs a pair of Texas longhorns. They have also bought an old boat in which they go to catch smelts on Lake Saint Clair. They have just finished paying $10,000 for a suburban lot nearer to the Massey-Ferguson plant, and soon they hope to start building a new house there...
...downtown retail area, demolition has begun on the site for a $220 million shopping project like no other in the U.S. Called Lafayette Place, it will include department stores, boutiques and European-style arcades, all arranged along internal streets and cul-de-sacs. The point: to compete directly with suburban shopping malls by creating a distinctive urban shopping environment. In many ways (see box), Boston is still pioneering...
...Orange Line's other highlight is an elevated Dudley stop, with an inbound platform surrounded by the second story of Ferdinand's, an old department store and the remains of what was once a suburban shopping center. Now Dudley is considered urban, not suburban, and there is ironic humor in a large painted sign on one of Ferdinand's walls, which reads, in barely legible letters, "BOSTON HERALD--MOST NEWS...