Word: wallop
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...WALLOP by Peter De Vries. 310 pages. Little, Brown...
Between the time the hammer hits the thumb and the brain signals the bad news, there is an instant when the victim is at peace with the absurdity of the situation. Mrs. Wallop prolongs that moment of truce longer and more cleverly than most of Peter De Vries' previous eleven novels...
...farce, faith and despair. It has none of the wrenchings of personal loss and religious crisis found in The Blood of the Lamb. There are no ghastly satirical accidents or bizarre deaths, such as befall the poet in Reuben, Reuben who hangs himself in an orthopedic harness. In Mrs. Wallop, the grotesque is thoroughly housebroken by De Vries' mastery of the instruments of parody. Literary styles and genres are lampooned, and holy cows milked. But Mrs. Wallop is really a response to the literary mother knockers, from Euripides (Medea) to Philip Roth (Portnoy's Complaint...
Irritated that Harvard prefers to wallop Yale annually for the sake of tradition rather than meet Penn in a winner-take-all showdown at Syracuse, and bothered by the Crimson's unshakable nonchalance about a formally recognized national champion, Harvard's critics have expressed their discontent in such various methods as Whall's highly emotional pieces and the NCAA's decision to recognize the I. R. A. regatta as an officially-sanctioned national championship...
Irritated that Harvard prefers to wallop Yale annually for the sake of tradition rather than meet Penn in a winner-take-all showdown at Syracuse, and bothered by the Crimson's unshakable nonchalance about a formally recognized national champion. Harvard's critics have expressed their discontent in such various methods as Whall's highly emotional pieces and the NCAA's decision to recognize the I.R.A. regatta as an officially-sanctioned national championship...