And matters are not helped by Told By an Idiot's style of physical grotesquerie which compounds the play's self-conscious surreality instead of contradicting it.
It often seems as though she is trying to diffuse the impact of what she writes, undercutting it, contradicting it — as if to say, "Just thinking out loud.
But nearly every other sentence in "Old School," like so much of Wolff's previous writing, fictional and not, tugs against that categorical assertion without exactly contradicting it.
Hats off, though, to the editors above all, for constructing a volume where each element reinforces every other, often by contradicting it, so that the whole vast book is more exciting than even its most impressive part.
And if we are dishonest, if we try to offer a vision for London while at the same time contradicting it with our national agenda, then we will also lose.
Although superficially dissimilar, the convergent results of these studies illustrate varying aspects of the principle of remaining active while never contradicting it.
