Word: anecdotalist
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...party go mad) and to Moscow (enduring an unaccountable vodka shortage). He also deals with aids anxiety and other distractions. Ironic and self-deprecating (his own description), he's neither wildly comic nor deeply dramatic. He's more like a good dinner-table talker, an agreeable anecdotalist with a nice sense of the ridiculous. Oh, yes, somehow he finished the book. It's in the stores...
Allen's method is different. In Oedipus Wrecks, his efficiency is that of the perfectly practiced anecdotalist, not wasting a moment on irrelevant detail, yet knowing when to linger over the important ones. In this brisk vignette, Allen himself plays Sheldon, victim of a kind of transcendental Jewish-mother joke. It would spoil the fun to say how he transforms a stock figure, a yammering, smothering mom (Mae Questel, who is splendid), from a private torment into a public menace, but it is literally magical to behold...
Deeley is an anecdotalist who resists making dangerous connections between life's incidents, and may feel that if these two women could be made one, all the right connections would be made for him. Their evening together is a contest of wills. If one of them can impose his or her version of the past on the others, then that metaphor will control not one life but three. But at the end they are sprawled in various attitudes of exhaustion and despair, with the truth still lying somewhere in between...
...look at Author Ford Madox Ford you might think he was one of those adenoidal Englishmen on whose mentality the sun never rises. After reading him you would have to admit yourself mistaken. Though not always graceful he is an agile writer, an anecdotalist of parts and humor, of quite un-British charm. Return to Yesterday is not just another old codger's autobiography. To read it is like being monologued by an expert. Author Ford, though gossipy, is also old-fashioned in his reticences, apologizes for not being even more so. "I have tried to keep myself...
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