Word: banality
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...Banal Lunch. To Falk, it long seemed impossible that he would ever be in the same league with the Glenn Fords. "I always romanticized that artists were a very special species and that ordinary people didn't become actors," he says. The son of a clothing retailer in Ossining, N.Y., Peter was ordinary people all right-a roughneck kid who dropped out of college to join the merchant marine in World War II, later got a master's in public administration at Syracuse University and spent three bemused, bored years as an efficiency expert in Connecticut...
Under the Bed. Take three fixed points: Philip Roth. John Cheever, Peter De Vries. Rogin is somewhere in the triangle they describe, nearer to Cheever than the others. Rogin shares Cheever's awareness of risk, his sense that to turn a corner of the banal may be to find oneself in a howling waste of strangeness...
...remembers him from a class at Stanford. "He's very conservative, but I think the net result is that he will contribute to the deliberations of the court because of his intellect. Somehow, I have more confidence in conservatives who are men of intellect than I do in banal persons...
...Maid expresses it well when she looks at a content Mr. and Mrs. Martin--"Let's not try to know. Let's leave things as they are." The way things are, however, is vacuous and inane, shot through with hypocrisy and hatred. The movement in the play from banal dialogue interspersed only by a few absurdities, (Mrs. Smith tells the Martins that her husband wets his pants; Mr. Smith says that a good doctor always dies with his patient, as a captain always goes down with his ship) finally to the rapid-fire staccato of words...
Mechanistic Particle. Working his way through medical school, Jesse assumes his maternal grandfather's name, Vogel, and does brilliantly. He becomes an acolyte of great men and husband to the daughter of a world-famous physician. Death is no mystery to him; it is simply a cold, banal fact. Love is the great puzzle, and it keeps turning cancerous in his hands. At the height of his career, Jesse is an important Chicago neurosurgeon. Delivering a learned paper on "Retrograde Amnesia," he notes that in certain brain injuries recent memories are more easily extinguished than distant memories...