Word: bolton
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There were several times during the evening when I thought "Mrs Gibbons' Boys" might save itself by turning into a complete farce. Unfortunately, it never did. The character of the mother, as played by Lois Bolton, is frequently pathetic: she is not insane, (as say, the two sisters in "Arsenic and Old Lace,") but is obviously genuinely in love with her sons. She is thrilled to have them back home even if it means a jail-break, and she is also quite serious about her Gas Company beau...
Novelist Miller thought that the trouble might be her placid style. She decided to take a completely new course. She picked herself the pseudonym of Isabel Bolton and, in 1946, published a novel in a new, free style, Do I Wake or Sleep. It consisted pretty much of the interior monologues of a woman of intuitions, like Isabel Bolton. This time, the critics were watching. The New Yorker's Edmund Wilson found the Bolton style "exquisitely perfect in accent"; some of it he compared to The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises. Said the Nation's Diana...
Beetle on the Blade. In her latest novel, Author Bolton tries to fill a larger frame. The Christmas Tree is the story of a possessive mother and a mother-possessed son, of how she got that way through a thwarted childhood and a loveless marriage, and of how her son became a homosexual and finally a murderer...
Murder Around the Tree. Most of the second half is a good deal less feminine and less successful. When Writer Bolton switches from memory to action, and from past to present, her pen seems to catch a bit of fuzz, her prose blurs a little, and the feelings of the son, his ex-wife and her new husband fog up. And her last-minute attempt to knit the son's tragedy to the world situation is a piece of synthetic, Freudian chop-logic as far-fetched as saying that a tug on an umbilical cord will ultimately release...
...action of the climactic murder scene, with Mother Danforth's family gathered around the Christmas tree, is powerfully done, without a trace of fuzz on the pen or fog in the eye. Yet Miss Bolton's is a lyric, not a dramatic talent. Whenever she tries to speak through a character who is not her own kind and her own sex, she loses her firm tone of voice. But, speaking for herself, Author Bolton has much to say. She says it in a style which Mary Britton Miller should have tried sooner...