Word: wheelings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cheating in business, of course, is older than the wheel. But corporate spooks and saboteurs are especially busy in today's global, high-tech economy, where the most prized assets can be stored on a disk and surveillance equipment can fit on a shirt button. To help slow them down, Congress passed the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, which carries a long prison term for intellectual-property theft. The good guys haven't had much luck yet, though not for lack of effort. The FBI has nearly tripled its investigations into corporate espionage in the past year...
...Jerusalem, a girl who has survived the internment camps of Sarajevo, appears mysteriously at the door of a convent. Quickly taken in by the nuns and the scholars in residence, this girl, Andrea, charms everyone. Her obsession with the show Wheel of Fortune becomes a central theme of the novel. Codrescu's interest focuses on Vanna White, a subject of mass worship who brings meaning to the world by connecting letters into words. References to the game-show throughout the novel bring with them the hope that somehow all the loose ends will eventually be tied...
Besides being dull, the plot entirely fails to come together at the end. The Wheel of Fortune theme that seems to show such promise never comes through and seems ultimately unrelated to the novel's meaning. The idea of a man bent on causing apocalypse to wipe out the consumer society is little more than a regurgitation of long overused cliches. And neither is the message of Messiah any major surprise. The messiah saves the world through-what else?-love! Here is a safe and time tested-vision but one incapable of laying claim to any originality...
...Part of the reason the system doesn't change is that few professors are anxious to reinvent the wheel, no matter how hard Faculty must work to make it roll...
...into the ignition and started to put the car into gear when I realized that I had no desire to ride in or drive a vehicle on which I had performed any kind of maintenance work. I drove very slowly at first, quite convinced that my bicycle wheel would in all likelihood fall off. As I eased back into the evening traffic, I found solace in following a VW van trying to pull a U-Haul up the mountain. My mind began to wander again and I thought about all the things that Harvard hasn't taught...