Word: tricking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...book is in nine episodes that could be, with minor adjustments, independent stories. "Hiding," the opening section, locates the emotional poles of the Vincent family. With a mischievous "hee hee hee," Rosie crams herself and her children into a huge linen closet. The point is to play a trick on Daddy, but Daddy won't play. He returns home and, finding no one about, simply sits down to watch a football game on TV. Here and elsewhere, he is like an inconveniently placed piece of furniture. Yet he is not without a saving gracelessness. Drunk at a dinner party...
...news is conveyed casually. In one chapter we are gunkholing with all the Vincents in their motorboat, and in the next an indeterminate amount of time has passed, and we learn that Rosie was killed when a train hit her car. It is an effective narrative trick that Minot might have learned from John Irving, who could have got it from Evelyn Waugh. Like them, Minot also knows how to blend the touching and the macabre. Monkeys ends with the Vincents each taking a handful of Rosie's ashes ("rounded and porous, like little ruins...
...makeshift court worked swiftly in Deadwood, presumably so that judge and jury could get back to gambling, drinking and whoring, the town's principal activities. Standing the myth of the American West on its head is % not a new trick. But this time out, Dexter performs it with unusual skill, grace and glee, particularly in his presentation of Calamity Jane. No act of violence or natural appetite passes without a graphic description. This is Blazing Saddles for grownups...
Then a rustle of papers, and the man puts on a delicate pair of wire-rim glasses. He begins to talk, to speak in smooth, connected sentences. As if by conjurer's trick, the laborer is transformed into the scholar, a solitary thinker who shies away from the world of action, a man of introspection who rises early to wrestle with questions of motivation and desire and write about them in a thick loose-leaf notebook...
...father, Obert Miller, had started with a dog and a trick pony. In 1924 Obert brought eight-year-old D.R. into the act. In 1932 D.R. met a fetching young farm girl named Isla at a barn dance in Kansas. In 1934 D.R. and Isla were married. By then Obert Miller's show had grown to four dogs, four ponies and a monkey, a big enough production to accommodate the newlyweds. For their efforts, D.R. and Isla earned a quarter a week to split. D.R. always bought a cigar with his portion, and Isla bought a candy bar with hers...