Jan Priddy’s Reviews > Trust > Status Update
Jan Priddy
is on page 306 of 402
Politically, it is finally compelling. Rask, after all, is a robber baron, a man without conscience, devoted only to money and winning. Sound familiar? In this way fabulously wealthy men are all alike. And sometimes (not just now) their wives are decent people who try to serve the needs of society. A wonderful art school vanished soon after a principal benefactor (a woman) died. Her sons failed to continue her gifts.
— Mar 01, 2025 05:00PM
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Jan Priddy
is on page 247 of 402
Someone should have caught it. At the earliest moment Ida could have known to quote from The Atlantic Monthly and call it The Atlantic, she would have been 88 years old. Editors should be old. I recently found Yoko Ono named in a memoir as "Oko Ono." The error jumped at me. I even researched whether Ono had ever used that abbreviation. Not that I could find. A twenty- or thirty-something might not notice.
— Mar 01, 2025 04:48PM
Jan Priddy
is on page 247 of 402
It would have been in The Atlantic Monthly that the fictional review appears that Ida quotes.
— Mar 01, 2025 02:38PM
Jan Priddy
is on page 247 of 402
It is possible that Ida is supposedly writing her memoir after 2003, and therefore knows The Atlantic by that new name rather than The Atlantic Monthly. She would be in her mid-80s, but I suppose it's possible.
— Mar 01, 2025 02:36PM
Jan Priddy
is on page 247 of 402
I get the conceit: the novel about a power couple, the fictional "autobiography" about them commissioned by the outraged husband, the memoir of the writer of that bio (which is what I'm reading now), and eventually the journal of the wife. I am promised a secret. Do I care in this? I am reminded of what Stegner did to Foote in fictionalizing her life and co-opting entire paragraphs without crediting her publications.
— Mar 01, 2025 02:30PM
Jan Priddy
is on page 131 of 402
I may stop here. The mental illness, which is, apparently a novelistic invention within this novel, about does me in. Time off for good behavior.
— Feb 24, 2025 11:13AM
Jan Priddy
is on page 57 of 402
Robber barons. This takes me back to my junior year and my research paper on Carnegie. We covered a couple of centuries in that class, but I remember social movement (trade unions, the Triangle Faculty fire, the suffrage movements) more than the wars, other than the smokey demonstration of Revolutionary War white powder. Unfortunately, our current bumbling wanna-be baron lacks any pretense of social responsibility.
— Feb 23, 2025 11:28AM
