Word: wastrel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...freedom--to purchase choices, immunities from the will of others, or of fate. If Imelda kept a collection of 2,700 pairs of shoes, it was not because (as some candle-snuffing moralists might think) she should be expected to wear them all, and must be judged a wastrel if she did not, but because the 2,700 pairs gave her options. Her step no doubt grew lighter in the knowledge of such freedom. Did she display her shoes the way that Jay Gatsby reveled in his wonderful shirts...
...Horace Robedaux (William Converse-Roberts), a clothier who fell in love with a well-to-do girl, is anxious about being sent to the war; he sees conscription as desertion of his wife Lizzie (Hallie Foote), his infant daughter and the baby on the way. While Lizzie's winsome wastrel of a brother (Matthew Broderick) gets into trouble with gambling debts and a pregnant girlfriend, Horace falls victim to the flu. There is a death in the family, and a birth. In Harrison, though, life's scars are hidden under high collars and good manners. If these folks keep their...
...clothes, another $18,000 to dress Twins Maclean and Zachary, 5, and $3,000 to buy the birthday presents "Mack" and "Zack" are obliged to give their Palm Beach playmates. Peter Pulitzer, athletic and severely good-looking, hopes to convince Circuit Court Judge Carl Harper that Roxanne is a wastrel unfit to raise the boys...
...inflation turned the U.S. into a nation of spendthrifts? And if so, is the tax-cut package that Ronald Reagan has placed before Congress the proper medicine to cure America's wastrel malaise? Those are some of the questions Congress now faces as it passes judgment on President Reagan's economic program...
Author Barry Hannah, 38, is also a connoisseur of the rundown, the tacky, the disreputable. Observes one wastrel: "My pappy's from Mississippi. He ain't worth nothing, but there he is." Pretty much the same thing can be said about Ray himself. Hannah is talented enough to make his hero's uninhibited meanness sympathetic and humorous. Ray says things that most people only think, at low moments: "I get tired of people. All of them driving around in their cars, eating, having to be." But unrelieved rascality can grow boring, and this short novel ends...