Word: authored
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Author Wilson's heroine is a smart, smug, vastly muddled and grimly girdled figure of middle-class bafflement. Meg Eliot is widowed in a fit of absentmindedness : her husband, a prosperous lawyer, is shot by a confused Asian student, who is really gunning for the Minister of Education of an Indonesian state. "If that had happened when we were young, there would have been a war about it," one character remarks. But there is no war, not even compensation for the widow. Instead, Meg faces only a set of sad second choices-social work, the society of Angry Young...
This novel has most of the elements of a fine murder mystery, but is written far better than most and leaves the reader with a wry, ironic aftertaste. Swiss Author Duerrenmatt showed Broadway, in The Visit, how an existentialist allegory of human greed and corruption can be made into exciting theater, especially if Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne are on hand (TIME, May 19). The Pledge uses a grisly crime to show how a man's stubborn faith can be defeated by a combination of senseless accident and faithlessness on the part of his fellows...
...Author Duerrenmatt turns his plot so neatly that he cannot help licking his chops over it. His final ironic twist is both fiendish and plausible, but he leads up to it in a sententious, preachy chapter. And the carefully spelled-out fact that selflessness and faith were the road to Matthäi's breakdown creates an atmosphere of intense depression. But none of these shortcomings can really harm an unconventional and psychologically ingenious mystery story...
...takes dingy rooms in Kensington, enrolls in a secretarial school. She tangles with her brother, a brilliant, sexually confused war wreck, who has turned from the complexities of civilized life to the simplicities of horticulture. Author Wilson puts his widow in the temporary toils of an Angry Young Man, the pointy-bearded but pointless son of her best friend. In a savage little vignette Wilson makes clear that the fellow is angry not because he is young, but because he is not really...
...Author Wilson keeps nudging the reader into the conviction that there has been a death somewhere in the British family; Wilson is obviously still trying to identify the corpse and sort out the suspects. Despite this essentially sad preoccupation, he is pure comedian with a mimic's malice, a gent's outfitter's eye for the socially off-base, and an eavesdropper's avidity for the give-away phrase. Wilson is a first-rate caricaturist whose stature increases as he diminishes others...