Word: bittersweet
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...master of this shadowy genre, and he is near the top of his form in his latest novel. His hero is a middle-age intelligence operative put to pasture by bosses who decide (wrongly, as it turns out) that his skills and mind-set are obsolete. A bittersweet love affair winds through a landscape of modern menace, whose vectors, by now quite familiar, are ethnic and religious mania...
Prairie Reunion by Barbara J. Scot (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 230 pages; $21) is a bittersweet homecoming story tracing the author's return in middle age to the puritannical farming community where she grew up. In Scotch Grove, Iowa, she tries to piece together the puzzle of her mother's loving stoicism in the face of her father's humiliating desertion and subsequent suicide. Structured as a patchwork of conversations, childhood recollections and lyrical encounters with the land, Scot's quietly earnest quest yields her valuable understanding of her mother's reticence and a deeper appreciation of the mysteries of family...
...church door. With wildly wobbling knees but a dizzyingly sure tongue, she rattles off an ever accelerating catalog of reasons why she shouldn't walk down the aisle. And Robert Westenberg, contemplating Robert's inquiry, "You ever sorry you got married?" offers a splendid version of that bittersweet hymn to ambivalence Sorry--Grateful. Westenberg vindicates the suspicion of those who (overlooking the cheesy arrangement of the original-cast recording) have long viewed this as one of Sondheim's most touching songs...
Interspersed with these reflections of the chaos he has witnessed as an adult are Morrow's bittersweet memories of his troubled childhood. He recalls injustices at the hands of self-absorbed parents whose "dreamy narcissism" and "dangerous veerings" kept them too preoccupied with their own lives to be concerned with his. What is revealed behind Morrow's frustrated rage is the uncomprehending powerlessness of a damaged, loveless child. "When the heart aches," he tells us, exposing the impotence of the violated, "the poor thing is screaming for blood...
...Harvard men's water polo team, the plane ride home from the Air Force Academy Invitational in Colorado was filled with mixed emotions--fatigue, frustration, optimism. Losses to such Top 10 teams as UC Santa Barbara and Air Force were bittersweet in that the Crimson was able to walk away with invaluable experience...