Word: wolff
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...DEBTS by Geoffrey Wolff. 222 pages. Simon and Schuster...
Such a character could easily have emerged as a mere cipher-caricature in a satiric, ham-handed social catalogue of the times. Not in this appealing first novel. Author Wolff, Newsweek's book editor, invokes Freeman and his long-suffering family with subtlety. Their relations with one another, it turns out, are also bad debts. His wife Ann, sexually and emotionally little more than an object of Freeman's consumption, has left him. His son Caxton, a conniving p.r. flack for a top political candidate, helps support his father-primarily because of the embarrassment the old man could...
Curiously-and convincingly-Wolff shows that it is the angry rogue in Freeman and his omnivorous vitality that somehow provide emotional support for his wife and son. In his outraged determination to exact from them the obligations that he feels due him, Freeman displays a savage despair that raises the book above the level of mundanity...
...Wolff added that it is "quite possible" that he. perhaps with other Faculty members, will send similar letters to the Faculty before future meetings. Walzer said that circulating such a letter "is not something we [the liberal caucus] have discussed...
According to Hermstein, the letter "was directed at trying to hold back somewhat against the tide of increasing politicization" of the Faculty. Wolff said that "we were not laying down the line...