Word: weltered
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This largely buried argument is all that connects the book's welter of anecdotes. A Chicago teen-ager named Harold Rubin is limned practicing self-abuse over photographs of nude women. He is joined in the narrative by the newly married Hugh Hefner, who wanders the streets and gazes at apartment windows where women might appear. Hefner makes room later for John Bullaro, a married Los Angeles insurance executive who bicycles to Venice Beach on Sundays to ogle sunbathers...
...college that, unlike Harvard, has been used to involvement by the entire community in decisions affecting it. Quoting Parker's statement that "The report is me," Iseman cites the fact that the only faculty members consulted in the preparation of the report were two part-time teachers and Rush Welter. He describes Welter, an American Civilization teacher with whom Parker had been publicly intimate for some time, as "a faculty maverick whose views had for years been contrary to those of his colleagues." Professor Paglia adds that "there was a feeling that educational policy was being made in the boudoir...
...parents around the turn of the 20th century. Denied a college education by her doting but traditional father, she is matched to an accountant with a Sephardic pedigree and a prim nature that denies her sensuality through 40 years of marriage. Four children are born and bred amidst a welter of domesticities. Passions are expended in the composition of herbaceous borders, the concoction of raspberry tarts and the preparation of potions of cocoa laced with rum and chocolate shavings. Yet Ariadne moves briskly through this classic obstacle course. And why not? She was named for the Greek princess who knew...
What happened? The first clue appears on the title page, where the word LETTERS is built up from a welter of small letters that, when properly viewed, spell the following: "an old time epistolary novel by seven fictitious drolls & dreamers each of which imagines himself actual." Letters made up of letters, fiction made up of fictions, Chinese boxes diminishing to emptiness. Such diminution is what the novel is about. The 772 pages that follow thus constitute a stunningly obsessive exercise in inflatio ad absurdum...
Attempting to preserve unity in this welter of people and subplots, Clark resorts to some by now familiar techniques. She cuts rapidly back and forth between characters and blends past, present and future: "Right now she was still in the same ugly, dun-colored frame house on a side street in Michigan, feeling poorly as usual, without a thought of setting out for anywhere, and a certain southbound pair of hikers were still at the Canadian end of the Long Trail, a long way from the Boonton crossing where a very different couple would shortly be murdered. Not that...