Word: wasps
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...usual, he hasn't got things quite right. A lot has changed here at Harvard since that momentous autumn when Mr. Pusey, doing his damnest to sound like a second-rate Fitzgerald narrator, first suffered unnoticed through a freshman bull session. And although the Freshman Yard, with its predominantly WASP administration, still smacks of a snobbishly genteel Harvard, the incoming freshman can rest assured that his first struggle with the Union's compost-like tapioca will not be interrupted by quick repartee at Katherine Mansfield's expense. In fact, clever, fragmented sentences as well as comfortably postprandial discussions are both...
...Nixon and Attorney General John Mitchell, who supervised the Administration's search for a new Justice, Haynsworth has ideal credentials. It is true that he would be a WASP filling a seat that has been traditionally Jewish since 1916, but Nixon never promised to abide by that custom. Privately, the President says that he does not consider that there is a Jewish, Catholic or Negro seat on the court. Haynsworth is a sitting federal judge who, at 56, can expect at least ten or 15 years on the Supreme Court bench. His decisions have been moderate to conservative...
...inhumanly cool, cruel irony convey the impression of barely repressed personal rancor, such as a son might feel in trying to discuss his father. Perhaps this, and the fact that it is set in the 1930s, is what makes Mr. Bridge more than an objective caricature of the uptight WASP personality so often under attack today. What emerges is a muted image of an American type as pure, enduring and applicable as George F. Babbitt ever was. Mr. Bridge's unwitting and rather dated dilemma, Connell suggests, is capable of pointing a lesson for today. The old, defensive virtues...
...Mannix is one. As he leaves the dinner to exchange ruefulnesses with an ancient Virginia jurist, the reader looks forward to a wry tour, perhaps in the Edwin O'Connor manner, of the world of liberal politics and conservative finance in which the old Jewish and old WASP families of New York meet...
...ONLY serious problem with the book is that much of the more controlled, more pointed social satire one associates with Roth has had to be forfeited. To be sure, there is still an overwhelming section on the WASP as seen by a young Jew. ("These are the children from the coloring books come to life, the children they mean on the signs we pass in Union, New Jersey, that say CHILDREN AT PLAY and DRIVE CAREFULLY, WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN.") It is more damning than anything in Roth's last novel, a story of an unwed mother in the great...