Word: bronsonism
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...which seemed to cut away to a Laszlo Kovacs Easy Rider scenic vista whenever something seemed about to happen; Alan Arkin's Yossarian in Mike Nichols' Catch-22; Carrie Snodgress's heroine and Frank Perry's paranoiac camera work in the somewhat overdrawn Diary of a Mad Housewife; Charles Bronson's headstrong investigator in Rene Clement's Rider on the Rain; the dripping decadence and provocative idea behind Performance; and the grand style of Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon and Michel Bouquet in the overly maligned Jacques Deray cartoon known as Borsalino...
...Robert Bronson, "the last great New England transcendentalist," is the ghost that got away. The author of Captain Hook's Gang, Sunday Mornings with Zarathustra and other poems, Bronson is something like a son of Ahab in corduroy pants. So long as he was in and out of psychiatric wards, so long as "his true sense of sight was anger," Bronson remained a darling of the Boston literati. But then-in 1953, to be exact -Bronson transcended: He found the One, the Oversoul, the Truth, the Great Zero that Emerson and all the earlier transcendentalists only dreamed of discovering...
Released by this mystical perception from the ordeal of playing out his role as the last New Englander, Bronson went to Japan, and was killed in a highspeed train crash. Even more devastating, his works and life fall into the hands of a professor-critic-and intellectual mortician-named Muldoon. A pugnacious Boston Irishman, Muldoon does a reckless reconstruct job on Bronson's Yankee soul-a rambling self-parody of scholarship which forms the loose frame of the novel. Understand Bronson, and you will understand America-"our present and our future." This is mad Muldoon's thesis...
...strongest presence in the novel -wilder than Bronson, more outrageous even than Muldoon-is the author. Born in Buenos Aires, graduated from Harvard, now a professor of Spanish and Latin American literature at Tufts, J.M. Alonso, 34, is one of the most exotic students of American character since that other Hispano-American, George Santayana. Tirelessly inventive in his theories and his jokes, Alonso exuberantly refuses to draw lines between the two. But on at least one or two points, he would seem to be speaking seriously, and for himself. Like Santayana, he knows in his Latin bones something the natives...
...Bronson, mad Muldoon, and mad Alonso may be right-this is the age of Ralph Disney Emerson. But what marvelously alive exceptions they make to the rule of blandness...