Word: swallowers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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More than most heroes of this spring's novels, Chick Swallow deserves a wide hearing. His troubles may not be every man's, but every man will understand them. He is modest: "I think I can say my childhood was as unhappy as the next braggart's." He is reflective: "Man is not a donkey lured along by a carrot dangled in front of his nose, but a jet plane propelled by his exhaust." And the surest guarantee that his difficulties will induce immoderate laughter is the fact that he is the creature of Peter De Vries...
Helter-Skelter. Swallow's fate is that of youth: dreams and aspirations kicked helter-skelter, as real life (a job, the rent, bills, relatives) runs roughshod over them. Chick and his best friend Nickie Sherman see themselves as continental wits, though fate has set them down in the town of Decency, Conn. But when they finish the play they are writing, they intend to take care of that. Wise Acres is the name of the play, and into it they have tooled such precious dialogue as: "There's Ronnie Ten Eyck. He's living with his mother...
...turn their wary eyes on the fantastic events in which, trancelike, the Indians accepted the Nehru raj from Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British viceroy. Baba teeters girlishly between the superstitious past (as a child she had retched over a dead fish's eye, which she tried to swallow in order to summon up strange powers) and the dull independent future, symbolized by her dull, enlightened father, who talks like an instructor in social science...
...discovered reaction could be used to propel missiles or even aircraft. Nitric oxide may not be the only catalyst that works. The scientists speculate that some solid catalyst might be made into a tube or a honeycomb. When carried swiftly by a rocket through the upper air, it would swallow great volumes of atomic oxygen and make it combine into O2 molecules...
...American Military Tradition, Historian Bruce Catton says that "the Civil War . . . infinitely broadened the category of American citizenship and the meaning of the American experiment ... It had committed the nation to a working belief in the brotherhood of man. This probably was a little too much to swallow at one gulp in the 18703 or at any other time." It is surely too big a gulp for one part of the nation to swallow without the help and vigorous cooperation of the rest...