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  3. Joy William’s quirky fourth novel The Quick and the Dead follows three 16-year-old misfits in an abnormal Charlie’s Angels set i

Joy William’s quirky fourth novel The Quick and the Dead follows three 16-year-old misfits in an abnormal Charlie’s Angels set i

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问题     Joy William’s quirky fourth novel The Quick and the Dead follows three 16-year-old misfits in an abnormal Charlie’s Angels set in the American south-west. Driven unclearly to defend animal rights, the girls accomplish little beyond curse: they rescue a wounded ox and hurl stones at stuffed elephants. In what is structurally a road novel that ends up where it began, the threesome stumbles upon both cruelty to animals and unlikely romance. A mournful dog is killed by an angry neighbor, a taxidermist falls in love with an 8-year-old direct-action firebrand determined that he pays for his sins. A careen across the barely tamed Arizona prairie, this peculiar book aims less for a traditional storyline than a sequence of noisy (often hilarious) conversations, ridiculous circumstances, and absurdist scene. The consequent long-walk-to-nowhere is both the book’s limitation and its charm.
    All three girls are motherless. Fiercely political Alice discovers that her parents are her grandparents, who thereupon shrivel: "Lie had kept them young whereas the truth had accelerated them practically into oldness". Both parents of the sorrowful Corvus drowned while driving on a flooded interstate off-ramp. The mother of the more conventional Annabel ("one of those people who would say, we’ll get in touch soonest’ when they never wanted to see you again") slammed her car drunkenly into a fish restaurant. Later, Annabel’s father observes to his wife’s ghost. "You didn’t want to order what I ordered, darling". The sharp-tongued ghost snaps back: "That’s because you always ordered badly and wanted me to experience your miserable mistake".
    Against a roundly apocalyptic world view, the great pleasures of this book are line-by-line. Ms. Williams can break setting and character alike in a few slashes: "it was one of those rugged American places, a remote, sad-ass, but courageous downwind town whose citizens were flawed and brave". Alice’s acerbity spits little wisdoms: putting lost teeth under a pillow for money is "a classic capitalistic consumer trick, designed to wean you away at an early age from healthy horror’ and sensible dismay to greedy, deluded, sunny expectancy".
    Whether or not the novel, like Alice, expressly advocates animal rights, an animal motif crops up in every scene, as flesh-and-blood "critters" (usually dead) or plain decoration on crockery. If Ms. Williams does not intend to induce human horror at a pending cruel Armageddon, she at least invokes a future of earthly loneliness, where animals appear only as ceramic-hen butter dishes and extinct-species Elastoplasts. One caution: when flimsy narrative superstructure begins to sag, anarchic wackiness can grow wearing. While The Quick and the Dead is sharp from its first page, the trouble with starting at the edge is there is nowhere to go. Nevertheless, Ms. Williams is original, energetic and viscously funny: Carl Hiaasen with a conscience.
选项 A、did nothing substantive except criticizing the reality
B、protected animals successfully
C、were cruel to the animals
D、murdered their neighbor’s dog
答案A
解析 事实细节题。题干是说小说中女孩的做法。第一段中心意思是：她们企图保护动物权益，但除了抨击一些现象外几乎没有什么实质性的突破。由"Driven hazily to defend animal rights, the girls accomplish little beyond cursing"这句话可以看出她们没有实质性成果。四个备选项中，"除针砭时弊外没有实质性的作为"正确。
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考研英语一

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