Word: vetch
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...James Leer, who as a fledgling writer excites his protective instincts. Grady and James share what Grady calls the "midnight disease" of the writer, a sense of their own strangeness that isolates them from the world. This dark side of writing is introduced in the person of Albert Vetch, a hack horror writer whose suicide Grady witnessed as a child. Vetch floats over the book as a symbol of the true artist, the estate to which Grade aspires: "He was the first real writer I knew, because he was the first to have the midnight disease; to have the rocking...
While the midnight disease is one of the novel's main preoccupations--it begins with the memory of Vetch, as if everything that follows is an elegy on the dark fate of the write--it is probably the least successful element of what is essentially a comic story. Chabon's strength is his witty, graceful, delicately absurd style, and his attempt to turn his comic creations into bearers of a secret curse does not come off. Grady remains a Rabelaisian "minotaur," too devoted to sex, marijuana and adventure ever to seem suicidal; even James is more quirky than disturbed...
...glance is enough to induce fidgeting in the average five-year old. Favorite Wildflowers Coloring Book, for instance, would be a pretty rotten gift if you were expecting a Barbie. On the first page, a table of contents tells colorists on what page they will find the Cow Vetch. Bonus: an Index of Scientific Names teaches the novice that the Cow Vetch is also called "Vicia cracca." Of course, every cool five-year-old already knows this...