The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

from the sequestered innocence of 1962,

her hair dyed an indecent red’),

He would then proceed to startle and goad the earnest and morose, briskly crushing their fashionable and half-baked preconceptions.

a thickening mist of drugs and boredom.

But this is only America, car-tool and lawn-sprinkler America, and Hum is Lo’s stepfather, and three times her age, and for two years he rapes her at least twice a day.

squalid, savage, and attritional – rather well suited, in fact, to modern tastes.

‘among the wrongs and relics of her seventy years’.

nutrition, collagen, shiatsu treatments, crystals, kinesiology and other desperate quackeries.

At this point it dawns on the reader that there are still 700 pages to go.