New book I'm reading: One Drop, by Bliss Broyard, about her family (her father the Times book critic was the inspiration for Philip Roth's The Human Stain, about a black man passing for white). I remember back in tenth grade reading one of his short stories: something about a man visiting his parents and feeling he couldn't talk to them b/c he was an intellectual and they were trying to talk about things that would make him comfortable--the father was a plumber, IIRC, and the mother's particular gift was figuring out how to manage well on a tight budget, but they didn't talk of those things together.

I'd always liked Broyard's reviews and thought he wrote beautifully, and the story made an impression on me--obviously, I'd read it differently now. In giving a report on the story, I said their relationship was "plastic," and immediately knew I'd used the wrong word. My tenth grade teacher, who fancied herself iconoclastic, said something like, "People are often phonies, aren't they?" probably seeing this as a parable about adolescence, but this was in my lefty period and I was full of sympathy for the working class parents and annoyed at the son, so I disagreed with her. It's the only fiction by him that I ever read; I'm curious about his memoir now.