- Fiction, Missing persons, Popular culture, Grandmothers
Lenore Beadsman, a 24-year-old telephone switchboard operator who gets caught in the middle of a Cleveland-based character drama. In Wallace's typically offbeat style, Lenore navigates three separate crises: her great-grandmother's escape from a nursing home, a neurotic boyfriend, and a suddenly vocal pet cockatiel. The controlling idea surrounding all of these crises is the use of words and symbols to define a person.
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Character
Contemporary, prestige, cool and spare.
- contemporarynostalgic
- unpretentiousprestige
- cooloverwhelming
- sparerichly built
- resolvedopen-ended
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About the book
- Author
- David Foster Wallace, Duke Riley
- First published
- 1987
- Pages
- 467
- Publisher
- Avon Books (Mm), Avon Books, Penguin Classics
- Editions
- 10
- Language
- English
- ISBN
- 9780143129448
Where to read
Libraries first: a card gets you most books for nothing. Each opens that service’s page for this title.
On Open Library, 5 have read it and 19 want to.
“Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.”
American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist whose dense works provide a dark, often satirical analysis of American culture
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