{"id":83016,"date":"2015-06-30T21:38:58","date_gmt":"2015-07-01T01:38:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp\/?p=83016"},"modified":"2015-07-02T13:32:51","modified_gmt":"2015-07-02T17:32:51","slug":"a-novel-for-our-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/2015\/06\/a-novel-for-our-time\/","title":{"rendered":"A Novel for Our Time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"first\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/product_thumbnail.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-83018\" src=\"http:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/product_thumbnail.jpg\" alt=\"product_thumbnail\" width=\"242\" height=\"365\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/product_thumbnail.jpg 212w, https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/product_thumbnail-99x150.jpg 99w, https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/product_thumbnail-199x300.jpg 199w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 242px) 100vw, 242px\" \/><\/a>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><em>In the Shadow of the Prodigy <\/em><\/strong><strong>by Frank van Dun<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">Reviewed by Thomas F. Bertonneau<\/p>\n<p>I happened to have been reading Frank van Dun\u2019s novel <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lulu.com\/shop\/frank-van-dun\/in-the-shadow-of-the-prodigy\/paperback\/product-22108735.html\"><em>In the Shadow of the Prodigy<\/em><\/a> (2015) during the week of the United States Supreme Court\u2019s latest trespass into the constitutional domain of law-making, formerly reserved to the legislative branch. The same week saw several new instances of Islamic savagery \u2013 in France and Algeria \u2013 and the collapse of the Greek economy. It is difficult to say whether these events colored my assessment of van Dun\u2019s prose or the other way around. I have been carrying a knot in my stomach for days; my brow has been creased. One way or another, <em>In the Shadow of the Prodigy<\/em> is a book for our time, breaking up the white dazzle of overlapping crises that constitutes the contemporary scene into the refracted strands of its elementary colors. Van Dun\u2019s story is a mystery, so I will be calling attention to it in such a way as not to divulge too many of its plot-points.<\/p>\n<p><em>In the Shadow of the Prodigy<\/em> narrates the collision of naivety with evil. The novel\u2019s various manifestations of evil appear banal but are no less wicked for their appearances. Indeed, as van Dun sees things, contemporary shoddiness and a fixation on low stakes belong to the prevailing corruption. The vileness that drives men and women to wanton deeds is as paltry in its objects as the evil is banal. Van Dun sets his action twenty-one years ago, in 1994, on the verge of that epochal event, the Internet, which serves the author for one of his chief symbols \u2013 a creeping multi-tentacular but invisible monstrosity that ensnares the multitudes of the unwary. <!--more-->The tale\u2019s protagonist, Michael Paradine, a young Englishman in his late twenties, has recently earned a doctorate in history. He copes with underemployment in the part-time outer orbits of the academic solar system, while he searches, without much commitment, for an adult station in accord with his <em>curriculum vitae.<\/em> One of his assignments, which he hopes will gain him advantage with potential employers, entails researching and writing a book about a business concern on commission from its proprietor and CEO. It is never entirely clear in what the enterprise of the Overton Group consists. Is it banking, insurance, commerce, manufacture? It little matters because the topic is boring and unmotivated. The book will likely go unread, as a young woman, not quite a girlfriend, says to Paradine.<\/p>\n<p>Everything, really, is boring. Paradine (van Dun tells his story in the central persona\u2019s first person) describes an academic conference on \u201ccommerce in the lowlands in the nineteenth century\u201d that he attends in Antwerp as \u201ctedious beyond compare.\u201d Paradine\u2019s work at the Hallamy Institute for Industrial Studies in London strikes the reader likewise as jejune \u2013 checking the bibliographical references in other people\u2019s manuscript articles for the scholarly journals in the field and undertaking a bit of correspondence. When a prospective supervisor enumerates the duties inherent to the opening at the Maritime Policy Studies Centre, for which Paradine considers applying, it sounds equally soul-killing: \u201cYour job would consist of maintaining and expanding our contacts with universities, other research institutes, and especially with economists, political scientists and historians working on ports, shipping, and trade and industry in so far as they are relevant to our main focus.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Paradine finds a more attractive possibility in remote Wainock, some hours north of London on the back roads whither he has gone to interview someone who might know something pertinent to a chapter of his not-yet-completed book. The Edward Lyme estate is looking out for an archivist even though as yet \u201cofficially there\u2019s still no vacancy.\u201d Paradine agrees to undertake a survey of the archives, to demonstrate both his interest and his <em>bona fides.<\/em> On his first attempt, the errand proves impossible. The cellar in which the musty documents reside, uncatalogued, is too dark and cold for anything to be done. Electricity has to be brought in and heaters installed. Paradine surveys the situation with some dismay: \u201cLarge dusty cardboard boxes\u201d abound; these are the \u201carchives.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Beyond the mess of decaying memos and reports, \u201cAll I could discern was loads of rubble, fragments of floorboards and plinths, smashed-up furniture, some kegs and a large number of wooden crates,\u201d as Paradine reports. He perseveres because he thinks that acquitting himself well belongs to his sponsor\u2019s plan \u201cto get me the job.\u201d As it turns out, selecting a new employee is a contest of self-assertion between the Estate, its associated polytechnic college, and the local town council, which partly funds these odd and pointless undertakings. No one associated with these institutions is ever candid with Paradine, who, however, takes the vagueness of the procedure \u2013 the half-promises and elaborate demurrers \u2013 as belonging to the natural order of things.<\/p>\n<p>Paradine makes personal as well as professional connections in Wainock. Indeed, he falls in love with Sarah Jones, the daughter of Ralph Jones, longtime friend of Alfred Hirsch, who is the probable \u201cprodigy\u201d of van Dun\u2019s title. Astute readers will expect the worst when van Dun gives the Jones residence the name \u201cMuirwenny House.\u201d \u00a0The second element of the name reverses the parts of the Elizabethan term <em>Whinny-Muir,<\/em> a type of Purgatory through which the soul of the deceased must pass on its way to any better destination. (See the famous \u201cLyke-Wake Dirge.\u201d) Wainock is mostly moor and marshland, reminiscent of the Wiltshire vale in V.S. Naipaul\u2019s <em>Enigma of Arrival<\/em> (1987) or the Cainsmarsh of H. G. Wells\u2019 <em>Croquet Player<\/em> (1937). Sarah is an ing\u00e9nue, even more na\u00efve than Paradine. Her father and mother are pieces of work. Also in Wainock, at Craigh House, Paradine makes the acquaintance of the two Holbrook brothers, with whom he has an extended philosophical exchange over dinner in the middle of the story.<\/p>\n<p>That exchange with the Holbrook brothers is in many ways the heart of van Dun\u2019s story, but <em>In the Shadow of the Prodigy<\/em> is a novel of exchanges \u2013 not quite a dialogue-novel, but drawing consciously on the Platonic tradition and executing the device with considerable aplomb. Paradine enters into symposiastic dialogue with four parties, who contribute to his never-fully-completed disillusionment concerning the world in which he lives. These are: Peter Vermeulen, David Allison, George Holbrook, and Sarah\u2019s mother (divorced from her father), whom the young man addresses as \u201cMrs. Jones.\u201d It would be best to take these in the order of Vermeulen, Allison, Sarah\u2019s mother, and George Holbrook. My purpose is not to give an elaborate summary of each conversation, but to quote a few key lines and comment on the gist.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Peter Vermeulen.<\/strong> Paradine runs into Vermeulen, \u201ca man of my age who was in charge of the archives of the Port Authority of Antwerp,\u201d while attending the meaningless academic conference early in the story. Vermeulen helps Paradine by producing documents apposite to the latter\u2019s research; Paradine even makes discoveries in the bundle of stale papers that draw him into the book\u2019s steadily growing mystery \u2013 and yet, once again, neither Paradine\u2019s project nor the Port-Authority documents have any intrinsic interest. They are uncollected detritus, with nothing to endow them with meaning. Vermeulen stands in slight contrast to Paradine in that he holds the type of job that Paradine seeks. Later events prove, however, that Vermeulen holds his post only tenuously against the ambition of his own secretary. The Paradine-Vermeulen dialogue is short, but Vermeulen introduces one of <em>The Prodigal\u2019s<\/em> critical topics: The purely secular society.<\/p>\n<p>Vermeulen makes a crass joke, over dinner, about a priest, a philosopher, and a psychotherapist only to undercut it with the remark that if there were as many believers as jokes about believers the world might be a more coherent place. His mood changing, he observes to Paradine, \u201cDe-Christianization is far more advanced here [on the continent] than in Britain.\u201d Paradine, whose education has not provoked him to serious thinking, wonders whether Vermeulen regards de-Christianization as a bad thing; the implication is that from Paradine\u2019s conformist view of things it is probably a good thing. Vermeulen rejoins that he barely knows or cares, but he adds that he worries \u201cwhat will fill the void when Christianity is gone\u201d; and \u201cwhat is to become of our civilization when the relentless drive to power is no longer kept in check at the grassroots by faith in a transcendent order.\u201d Vermeulen suspects that it \u201cwon\u2019t end until all human relations are founded on distrust.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Although the reader is only thirty or so pages into the text, he will already have seen these characteristics of power-fixation and distrust in operation socially. People who can open the way to employment hold power over those who want its sensation, exercised in the cause of infinitesimal degrees of bureaucratic rank and meaningless pseudo-work. Vermeulen even speculates that another, rather more appropriate, word for modern politics, including the politics of employment, is \u201cthe void.\u201d At Wainock, where Paradine went to interview Alfred Hirsch (who, however, died just before he arrived) Ralph Jones and several others treated him with rudeness and suspicion, whose ground they refused to divulge.<\/p>\n<p><strong>David Allison.<\/strong> \u201cThe economics of big ships\u201d is Allison\u2019s purview. Currently \u201ca guest lecturer at Greenwich University,\u201d Allison organizes \u201ca special programme for political science students\u201d and is \u201cdoing a series of lectures on the economics of naval warfare.\u201d Paradine has not seen Allison since they went to school together before their higher education. Allison, surprised that Paradine has not advanced further in an academic career, thinks out loud that, \u201cSomehow, I think you wouldn\u2019t fit in a modern university\u201d; and \u201cI don\u2019t think you\u2019d be willing to put up with rampant opportunism of the present system of funding research.\u201d Allison, to whom van Dun apportions most of the speaking on this occasion, tells Paradine that everything in academia now functions according to the \u201cconsultancy\u201d principle. Everything real has vanished into the verbal abstraction. \u201cAbstract people,\u201d says Allison, \u201cthrive on words, slogans, platitudes, clich\u00e9s, and of course formulae, formulae, formulae.\u201d That is what Abstract People learn in school, so that they might qualify to \u201csit behind a desk somewhere in the corporate world\u2026 They think they are gods \u2013 gods in a humble station, gods of their universe between the in-boxes and out-boxes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>On a second occasion, the topic is democracy or more particularly the much-vaunted franchise. This time, it is Paradine who shares an insight with Allison, and who does most of the talking. When Allison inquires whether the upcoming local elections interest Paradine, Paradine replies, \u201cI don\u2019t vote, on principle.\u201d Paradine sees voting for this or that party or politician as equivalent to writing \u201ca blank cheque.\u201d When someone writes a blank cheque \u201con the accounts of others,\u201d moreover, it amounts to \u201cfraud.\u201d The principle of politics in a democracy, Paradine argues, is that \u201cif I loot your bank account then that\u2019s a crime; but if I vote for a politician to loot your bank account then that\u2019s a legitimate attempt to modify the tax laws.\u201d Whatever modern democracy is, Paradine tells Allison, \u201cit\u2019s not representative.\u201d At most, \u201cwe have permission\u2026 to elect rulers.\u201d It is especially absurd, as Paradine sees things, that fractional majorities should impose regimes on the whole people.\u201d Allison had earlier indicted academia for conformism and opportunism. Paradine believes that the whole society is conformist and opportunist, with both conditions being disguised by rules and regulations that make exploitation anonymous and difficult for ordinary people to understand or indict.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Mrs. Jones.<\/strong> Paradine\u2019s encounter with Sarah\u2019s mother occurs near the end of the novel, after the central Platonic exchange with George Holbrook, and just before the novel\u2019s violent climax. Mrs. Jones has been divorced from Mr. Jones for many years and has lived independently of her family in London doing work as an \u201cactivist\u201d in the usual range of recognizable liberal causes. Vermeulen had earlier introduced the idea that all-pervasive distrust will be the consequence of de-Christianization and the bureaucratization of society, but Mrs. Jones sees distrust as the witting programmatic basis of the liberal utopia \u2013 and she endorses it, as a valid precept. Van Dun contrives Mrs. Jones to be the most fanatical ranter of his novel\u2019s several first-rate ranters. She is the <em>The Prodigy\u2019<\/em>s Thrasymachus or Callicles. She is Vermeulen\u2019s \u201cvoid\u201d given speech, chiding her ex-husband for adhering only to \u201cthe old socialism\u201d while she adheres to something radically new. Whereas \u201cthe old socialism\u201d inculcated people to fear <em>other people<\/em> so that they would need the government to protect them and mediate disputes; the new radicalism plans to inculcate people so that they \u201cfear themselves as much as or more than they fear others.\u201d The principle of distrust must be extended to the private self-image.<\/p>\n<p>To achieve this, the regime must make people \u201cselfless\u201d in the strict etymological sense: Not charitable, as in Christian ethics, but literally without self or identity. The imposition of \u201cdiversity\u201d provides an excellent tool: \u201cMake the East a model for the West and the West a model for the East. Better yet, make men a role model for girls and women a role model for boys\u2026 The true key is to make people distrust, even loathe the one education they\u2019re familiar with [and that would be] the one they got from their parents.\u201d The resultant society of \u201cnobodies,\u201d lacking all competence including their belief in themselves, will be maximally amenable to manipulation by \u201cbureaucrats\u2026 functionaries, employees, consultants, and experts in the pay of large corporations.\u201d The goal of the movement \u2013 whose actual existence, Mrs. Jones strongly hints \u2013 is to \u201cmake politics whole\u201d; it shall be \u201cthe power of Man over Man, in charge of his own destiny \u2013 whatever that may be.\u201d All sorts of alluring causes can serve the purpose: Environmentalism, consumer-advocacy, feminism \u2013 \u201cwords\u2026 to create new masses.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>George Holbrook.<\/strong> The Holbrooks are Catholics \u2013 farmers in Wainock and neighbors of Ralph Jones. Paradine made Tim\u2019s acquaintance at the funeral service for Hirsch, for whom Catholicism served as moral camouflage. (But that belongs to the plot, which I have promised not to spoil.) George suffers from injuries in youth and is an invalid. He keeps the books for his brother who sees to the physical side of farming. George is by lifelong reading a theologian and a philosopher. He enjoys dialectic and instigates a discussion over dinner by asking Paradine about his religious convictions, if any. Paradine declares himself an \u201cagnostic.\u201d George surprises Paradine by describing himself as a \u201cpracticing Catholic\u201d and therefore as a \u201cbelieving agnostic.\u201d As George points out, \u201cnot knowing does not exclude belief,\u201d taking the word <em>belief<\/em> as synonymous with <em>faith.<\/em> What then is <em>belief<\/em>? George says, \u201cWe believe that the gospel stories about Jesus are true, but we don\u2019t \u2013 we cannot \u2013 <em>know <\/em>whether they are true, or false.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>George contrasts <em>agnosticism<\/em> with its de-negated antonym: <em>Gnosticism.<\/em> \u201cNow, a Gnostic pretends he knows either the one or the other, usually the other.\u201d Following up the point, George reminds Paradine that while the evidence for Jesus is documentary the preponderance of documentation favors belief rather than non-belief. George puts the question to Paradine, \u201cWhich\u2026 of the teachings \u2013 alleged teachings, if you prefer \u2013 of Jesus would you say, or know, are not true?\u201d Paradine admits that he has no reason to count as untrue any utterance traditionally ascribed to Jesus. What then is <em>truth<\/em> in this framework? The truth of the Good News consists in that the Good News points to transcendent things that <em>are<\/em> no matter how much they suffer deformity in their manifestations or applications in the world. Truth does not <em>exist; <\/em>truth <em>is.<\/em> Similarly, according to George, God does not <em>exist;<\/em> God <em>is.<\/em> George says: \u201cGod <em>is<\/em> outside time and space. This does not mean that He <em>exists<\/em> outside of time and space, and it does not mean that He is an imaginary character.\u201d Nor is the case of God unique: \u201cMany things <em>are,<\/em> although they don\u2019t exist: Numbers, for example.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The conversation comes around to a critique of modernity. George has thought it through: \u201cModern philosophers confuse being with existence, just [as] modern lawyers confuse existence and fiction. Modern intellectuals, whose inflated egos would burst the moment they admitted any respect for God, dutifully revere legal fictions.\u201d God is the final judge of human self-justification, and the Gnostic disbelief in God is linked to the understanding of that Godly office. Modern people have been taught that desire and impulse give sufficient ground for action to the extent that \u201cit\u2019s considered very nearly an insult if one asks for a justification.\u201d Their faith in themselves is bad faith, skulking excuse-making faith. Modern people so keenly try to persuade others to subscribe to their beliefs because they do not really believe in their own beliefs, but only <em>want<\/em> to believe in them to license their indulgences. George is answering Vermeulen\u2019s question, \u201cWhat is to become of our civilization when the relentless drive to power is no longer kept in check at the grassroots by faith in a transcendent order?\u201d The licensing of all indulgences is what will become of it.<\/p>\n<p>Just as George believes in God, so also he believes in the Platonic virtues or excellences. George asks: \u201cThe better is the logic of an argument, the better or more excellent is the argument, right?\u201d Paradine replies that, indeed, \u201cit is unthinkable that logic is an imaginary, not a real standard of excellence.\u201d George extends the argument beyond logic to wisdom: \u201cIf wisdom were not a real standard of action then it would be all the same whether you commended a wise policy or a stupid one or an evil one.\u201d Paradine experiences increasing agreement with George, but he instinctively raises the question of theodicy. George replies that people misunderstand God as worldly power, but \u201cphysical power, the ability to move material things, is not an excellence.\u201d In an aphorism, \u201cGod is the Word, not a bulldozer or a sledgehammer\u2026 he\u2019s our beacon, not our pusher.\u201d We recall that Mrs. Jones sees herself as a pusher.<\/p>\n<p>Seeing herself as a pusher, Mrs. Jones logically sees herself as the equivalent of the God whose \u201cexistence,\u201d which she misunderstands, she also denies. Mrs. Jones arguably believes hardly at all in herself although she would like to do so. By reducing the masses to slavish dependency, and by constituting the Godlike bureaucracy that will rule the world the way the old Babylonian gods ruled the universe, Mrs. Jones will create sufficient distance, measured by power, between her and others to convince herself of her superiority and, on its basis, her existence. Because Mrs. Jones cannot conceive of being, she cannot aspire to it. Mrs. Jones, the specimen of the modern Gnostocrat, dooms herself to the \u201cvoid.\u201d The wickedness in Mrs. Jones\u2019 program is that she dooms everyone else to the \u201cvoid\u201d along with her. Mrs. Jones dooms others in part because others cannot bring themselves to believe in the fullness of her evil and <em>that<\/em> is the case in part because Mrs. Jones is outwardly so banal and unnoticeable against the degraded background of the prevailing social condition that she passes for normal. Not even Paradine, who by the time he meets Mrs. Jones has begun to take the measure of his world, can bring himself to acknowledge the fullness of her evil; he must pass it off as neurosis and as utopian dreaming. Still less does Sarah grasp what her mother is. Sarah is not evil \u2013 far from it. But she lives in a state of childlike innocence, which might well be the plan of her father. She needs rescuing, but she should be rescued by someone with maturity, and Paradine is not, himself, so very mature.<\/p>\n<p><em>The Shadow of the Prodigy<\/em> has spoken to me with surprising persuasion. I bring to contemporary fiction a prejudice of conformity and inadequacy which, on those occasions when I test it, usually proves veracious. In this case, however, I find myself surprised. Van Dun\u2019s landscape of institutes and research facilities even in remote places like his fictional Cunnir; his cities of abandoned factories either tumbled to ruin from disuse or refashioned as urban shopping-centers; his networks of associated functionaries and bureaucrats who seem to ken one another\u2019s wishes immediately even without the digital Internet which, at the moment, is urging itself on the world: These metaphors of his story convey the moral shoddiness of the West in its contemporary moment; but they equally well convey the insidious way in which moral shoddiness can elegantly technologize itself in the form of an electronic web that becomes the monopoly of information. As in the novels of Conrad, what one calls a \u201cweb\u201d is usually a sinister conspiracy, a criminal enterprise, and a moral abomination.<\/p>\n<p>Van Dun is probably not a pessimist \u2013 or why would he write this novel? But his vision of our plight is a grim one. What he implicitly invokes is the imperative that, as we all are mortal and shall die, we should be martyrs, not necessarily as in the Coliseum, but by sharpening our insight and testifying without cavil about what we believe \u2013 by contradicting those who know, and whose knowledge is mostly denial, and by insisting on the necessity of truth in the metaphysical sense. If I spoke truth, I would have to say that I have invested much dubious effort in the attainment of trivial ranks and badges. I begin to see this, but I see also with increasing clarity that the desire for infinitesimal advantage has become an acute affliction, deforming our society in the direction of a state in which, quite as Mrs. Jones wants, no one trusts anyone else because no one trusts himself \u2013 and everyone looks to <em>Them<\/em> for guidance, as though <em>They<\/em> were God. People want infinitesimally differentiated superior rank in the institutions because they vainly identify such rank with power.<\/p>\n<p>Powers are destroying our world \u2013 judicial power, propaganda power, bureaucratic power, and so-called \u201chuman resources\u201d power.<\/p>\n<p>I strongly recommend Frank van Dun\u2019s novel and urge my friends to buy it and read it.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">&#8212; Comments &#8212;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><strong>Dean Ericson writes:<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">If the book is half as good as this review it will be well worth the $4.99 I just paid for the Kindle version. Now I\u2019ll have to find time to read it since I\u2019m halfway through \u201cCook and Peary: the Arctic Controversy Resolved,\u201d Robert Bryce\u2019s fat and fascinating account of the two famous explorers (neither one of whom, it seems, actually made it to the North Pole), and then I made the mistake of starting a re-read of Robinson Crusoe, that perpetually compelling yarn of such vivid detail that it\u2019s as hard to put down as it is to believe Defoe made it all up. And then, too, this Bertonneau fellow is already to blame for larding up my bedside table with H.G Wells.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">The review is so thorough I feel as though I already understand the book and so don\u2019t need to read it. But I will, not only because plumbing the depths of the unfolding disaster is worthwhile but also because he teasingly left out the \u201cwhodunnit\u201d (and maybe even the juicy parts, namely; dead bodies, car chases, and wild sex). Thanks to Mr. Bertonneau for this fine review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; In the Shadow of the Prodigy by Frank van Dun Reviewed by Thomas F. Bertonneau I happened to have been reading Frank van Dun\u2019s novel In the Shadow of the Prodigy (2015) during the week of the United States Supreme Court\u2019s latest trespass into the constitutional domain of law-making, formerly reserved to the legislative [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83016"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":83105,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83016\/revisions\/83105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}