This undertow of denial and avoidance is unfortunate in a novel with so much verve, making it feel overly tame, as if Sullivan wants to soothe and reassure her characters rather than letting them face the truths that might have elevated "Commencement" into a league with, say, that paragon of women's college novels, "The Group".
One of her English characters, reassuring another, says, "Good heavens, this isn't Africa".
It came at a good time, too, reassuring that our characters are not all irretrievably stuck in tedious personal melodramas.
"I know it did not turn out exactly the way you wanted it," one character reassures another, when a creative project goes bust.
Trouble is so much in the air in KICK IN THE HEAD (Doubleday, $22), Steven Rinehart's debut collection of short stories, that when, in the title story, one character reassures another, "Everything's going to be fine," it registers as a particularly pathetic self-delusion.
But the retrospective tone of that show made it reassuring: you knew the lead character, played by Fred Savage, was going to be all right.
While admitting that the dream sequence and reset button technique were arguably uninspiring clichés, in the case of "Attack on Cloudbase" he defended the use of such plot devices for their suitability in both initially alarming viewers (with the apparent deaths of the main characters) and ultimately reassuring them (with the revelation that the attack on Cloudbase was, in the end, "all a dream").
Ryder's characters reassured us that the meek will inherit the Earth if they wait long enough and are pure of heart.
And on screen, he plays droll and sympathetic characters of a kind the French call "reassuring".
Previous shows about gay characters have given the straight audience a reassuring guide into their worlds.
