Word: vic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...warm, sunny day in Southern California, and at the Vic Braden Tennis College in Coto de Caza, 60 miles southeast of Los Angeles, a few dozen students are watching a most peculiar exhibition. At one end of a tennis court, a ball machine flings one ball after another across the net. Seated on a chair on the opposite side, a short, chubby man, racquet in hand, rises to meet each one, hitting it squarely with a looping forehand. Thwack. Thwack. The balls whiz back over the net, landing just inside the base line...
...Vanessa Redgrave entered the world, her father Michael Redgrave was playing Laertes opposite Laurence Olivier's Hamlet at London's Old Vic Theater. During the curtain call, Olivier gestured for silence and announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, tonight a star is born. Laertes has a daughter." Olivier probably thought he was being gracious rather than oracular. But the man generally acknowledged as the greatest actor of his age in the English- speaking world proved as inspired in his fortune-telling as in his art: the infant born on Jan. 30, 1937, has ripened into the greatest actress in the English-speaking...
Reading Nice Work simply for the story is a waste of time. The characters are almost entirely one-dimensional. After introducing Vic and Robyn in the first section of the book, Lodge simply turns them loose--they almost automatically begin to lose their disrespect for one another, become friends and wind...
...beauty of Nice Work is that abstract literary concepts take on a real meaning in determining the lives and outlooks of the characters. Vic, for example, sees the feelings he develops for Robyn as "love," while Robyn says that love is "a rhetorical device," a "bourgeois fallacy" and a "literary conjob." It's just another word used to exploit people...
Lodge sets up a neat tension in the novel between the analytical literary world of Robyn, who doesn't believe that anything exists beyond text, and the bottom-line-conscious world of Vic, where only real things matter...