Word: unraveler
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Faulkner's detective-hero, Gavin Stevens, is a small-town Mississippi lawyer with gritty common sense and a shrewd insight into poor-white psychology that enables him to unravel his county's crimes. Up to a point he is both likeable and credible-a Yoknapatawpha County Sherlock Holmes-but Faulkner runs him to the ground by overloading him with unnecessary and undemonstrated learning ("a Harvard graduate . . . who could discuss Einstein with college professors") and with too much folksy moralizing...
Unlike the best of his earlier drawings, these are vaguer in outline, foggier in theme, harder to unravel. Like them, they feature literal and psychological nakedness. His first two books were worth the time of anyone who was willing to look at himself in psychic undress and momentarily exchange his individuality for the plight of today's mythical Everyman. Dean doesn't have "entirely different thoughts now" (see cut); he merely has more incomprehensible ones. Psychiatrists may decide that Dean is now poking around at a deeper level of the subconscious; to plain folks and old-fashioned artists...
...Angeles cops had to sweat to unravel traffic jams when two neighboring drugstores got involved in a furious price war. The store managers kept each other under surveillance with "price spies," set up sidewalk blackboards to notify street crowds of new price cuts, drew mobs of customers by selling pie a la mode for a penny, women's panties for 25?, steak dinners...
...learned too. Warden Tyndall was the hero of a new novel by a front-ranking Canadian novelist and short-story writer, 45-year-old Morley Callaghan (They Shall Inherit the Earth, Such Is My Beloved). Actually, Tyndall's purpose (and Callaghan's) was to do more than unravel the character of Toronto: it was to raise money...
...bureau, located in Straus Hall, hopes to unravel some of the increasing problems in the College and Graduate schools...