Word: antic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...passions. In their wake Philanthropist Astor, now in her early 80s, slyly subtitles her fourth and best book "a period piece." Actually, it concerns two periods: the year before the Crash and the time after middle age. She is obviously an expert on both. With witty understatement and antic plot, she shows a high social stratum at its apogee. Messages are delivered on silver salvers. A titled Englishwoman seems to have stepped from a Gershwin song, down to the exclamation, " 'S wonderful." Irma's son, rendered useless by the lack of a trust fund, laments, "My parents have never...
...reader feels the burned crumbs far more palpably than what Billy, in her carefully bored monotone, calls "the rapturous consummation." Frank concludes, "Were we to cohabit, I believe I would be driven nuts and she would come to loathe me." By contrast, marriage looks positively seductive. Were this antic reversal all, Colwin could be categorized as an antiromantic romantic, half in love with the dreams she punctures. But the author, despite her subject and style, is that rarest of modern artists, a moralist...
...that crossed it like mysterious rivers; I fitted my attention exactly to the ridgings of her knuckles, the wedding ring, her pale, flat nails." Not a false note sounds in these recordings of sorrow and sudden grace. Deborah Eisenberg's characters are a unique amalgam of the brave and antic; they regard difficulties seriously, but not themselves. In their perceptions and urban locutions, they might be the daughters of J.D. Salinger's women, the new Phoebes and Frannys, distressed, astonished and ultimately strengthened by the bewildering demands of contemporary life...
...working designers and future fashion exhibits. It is smartly curated and mounted with the kind of refinement that leaves room for a witty little coup like showing two pair of knee breeches on busily pedaling half-mannequins. On the top floor, some 18th century costumes move in almost antic procession on mannequins molded like silhouettes in some three-dimensional shadow play. Below, on the 19th century floor, a woman dresses for the opera in a ravishing gown by Charles Frederick Worth; across the gallery, an array of simple cottons and linens arranged as if for a Sunday outing...
...where the sculpture went--bulls and Greeks, and the Hiram Powers slave chastely displaying her fetters to the white copy of the Apollo Belvedere. The Brooklyn Museum, scorning such conventions, has turned its rotunda into a boat show. It is full of small craft of every kind, antic parodies and phantoms of seaside fun, not one of which will float. There is a dory made of concrete and a small runabout, or rather the Platonic ghost of one, made of glass reinforced with wire mesh; a sailing dinghy made of sheet copper; and a trio of bright blue, toylike sailing...