Caterina.net: Ho ho HO! This is a funny book.

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{ Monday, December 1, 2003 }

Ho ho HO! This is a funny book.

I've been meaning to read Pictures from an Institution by Randall Jarrell, for a long time now (how many books can I say that of?) and finally had the chance this afternoon, if only because the Dickinson biography I'm reading is too big to tote around and I was looking for something smaller. I'm only 40 pages in, but it seems to be about a nasty novelist, Gertrude Johnson, who is writing a poisonous novel about her colleagues at Benton College, where she is spending a year teaching creative writing. Here she is skewering the College President's wife. Or is it Randall Jarrell?

People did not like. Mrs. Robbins, Mrs. Robbins did not like people; and neither was sorry. She was a South African -- not a native, not a Boer, a colonial. She had been a scholar once, and talked somewhat ostentatiously of her work, which she tried to keep up. To judge from her speech, she was compiling a Dictionary of Un-American English: if lifts and trams ever invade the North American continent, Pamela Robbins is the woman to lead them. Often, when you have met a true Englishwoman -- the false ones are sometimes delightful -- you feel that God himself could go no further, that way. Mrs. Robbins existed to show what he could do if he tried.

That doesn't even do justice to the way on line of hilarity is sustained over many pages. And the paragraph after that was funnier, but offensive. I'll find a funnier one later.

LINK | 11:48 AM | TB

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