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son are introduced to "park culture, which is something to see":
Queuing at the snack stall with all the other weight problems and
skin conditions, among the multiple single mothers in crayon-color
beachwear, the splat and splotch of English skin, beneath treated hair,
and the sticky children each needing its tin of drink, Richard watched
the joggers pounding the outer track in scissoring shellsuits of
magenta, turquoise, of lime or sherwood green . . .
. . . One man and his dog went by the other way, man as thin as
a fuse, dog as cocked and spherical as a rocket. The sloping green was
mud, churned and studded, beige and dun, half soil, half shit. On the
bench, Marco faced the prospect with the candid bewilderment of his
gaze, turning and lifting his head, every few seconds, to his father's
stunned profile.
701
Dogshit Park - where every dad may while away his Sunday after–
noons, proud at least of having rescued the kids from kiddie videos
(Decimator!) or the "Sinistors" and "Horrortroids" of kiddie TV:
Dogshit - that verdant world, the ghost of Eden, so late our happy
seat . .. From a distance the grass had a layer of silver or pewter in it:
the promise or the memory of dew. Up close, its green was as munic–
ipal as paint. And then there were the formal flowers, the pudding
bloom, the gladioli in their thin old-lady overcoats; the flower bed
was Dogshit's flower hat. People, park wanderers, provided other
colors, from other countries: spice and betel.
Amis, alas, is too protean for this reviewer's grasp. (I pass this chal–
lenge on to you, dear reader and fellow sleuth.) Just when 1 think 1 have
the writer pinned as metaphor king (who else would write about a
"star-bright brassiere"), I am bowled over by a run of adjectives ("The
whispering girls with their wavering vowels") . And what about those
crackling verbs, or is it the pairs of verbs that so astound (the fat man
whose "folds seemed to slur and slobber over two seats," things that
"swivel and realign," the child engrossed in "ensnaring and entwining
various animal figurines," or our hero Richard's unlaundered socks that
"cracked and creaked to his touch"? Arnis. seems to have mastered every
form, measured every word, meted out every meticulous ounce of punc–
tuation, about which he is notoriously prickly and proud. (Never mind
the large advance, the recent divorce, the new teeth, the focus of so
much silly
Sturm und Drang
in the British and American press over the
