Word: uppers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...some unexpected territory. Nassau County on Long Island is obviously suburban, reaching only 20 miles from Manhattan at its farthest point. Most Americans would also consider California's Marin County to be a suburb: many of its residents commute across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco from upper-bohemian Sausalito, sophisticated Mill Valley or nondescript San Rafael...
Both moves are disastrous. The context is so implausible that one cannot believe in the honesty of the theatrical experience. We are shown a stiff-upper-lip Colonel firmly set in the aristocratic European military tradition-and are asked to accept him as part of upper-class New York social circles. We are asked to believe in a young debtype with scruples about sex and religion. And, after one of the greatest tie-loosening decades in American history, we must also accept her guilt over marrying the man she loves against her mother's wishes...
Political dishonesty, the corrupt judicial system, deadening public schools, debilitating programs ostensibly in existence to help the poor, and the futility of the political process itself all surfaced-destroying the illusions carefully implanted by upper middle class high schools. In response, the left fought to decentralize, to depoliticize justice, to free children from the tyranny of public schooling, and to organize cooperatives. Its efforts were frustrated by liberalism's refusal to dismantle the machinery of power, prompting many on the left to wonder about the legitimacy of that power...
...decided to do nothing and wait for the demolition. But his strategy backfired: a fire broke out three weeks later on an upper floor of the building where a group of street people had started a commune, and the resultant blaze gutted the building. Four firemen were hospitalized when a wall fell on them...
Buechner's characters do not easily lend themselves to humor. The narrator is a bachelor approaching middle age, who lives with his cat on the Upper East Side, and goes to the hospital every day, to visit his twin sister, who is dying of a bone disease, and has just been divorced by her husband. The narrator's subject is the middle-aged founder of a Southern fundamentalist religion, which ordains anybody to the ministry by request (and the payment of a love offering), a former Bible salesman who did five years in jail for exhibitionism. The other characters...