Word: charnel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Brown, the protagonist of Mark Harris' new novel, is a man who cannot even bring himself to exterminate a neighbor's annoying dog. Yet his mind is a charnel house of potential victims, executed because he thinks nearly everyone around him helped send his mistress's son to death in Viet Nam. Incurably infected by the anger and violence of the past decade, Brown fires off anonymous and threatening letters to presidents, neighbors, even chance acquaintances who displease...
...addition to this anatomical legacy, Clementine gets Charnel Castle, a moldering shambles with a bottomless wine cellar. It is a timeless madhouse, swarming with unpaid servants and port-guzzling visitors. Its bedrooms are equipped with convenient women of various shapes and attributes. Rose, for instance, has webbed feet...
...life. The book does not have much meaning, only an animal warmth, at once grotesque and touching. Donleavy seems to be saying that this warmth is the only thing about which we can be certain. "To make the stars bark" is his sole justification for the antics at Charnel Castle. Molecules of cooling human scent spreading thinner and thinner through the heavens according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics? It would seem so-in Donleavy's world at least, where man is the ultimate agent of disorder...
...grotesque aspect of all war that it becomes a sort of chess game in a charnel house. At week's end Nixon, as if to find a brief respite in a crisper tradition, flew to Camp Pendleton, Calif., to welcome home the 1st Marine Division after five years of bloody fighting. Acrid white smoke rose over the parade grounds from a 21-gun salute. Nixon, thoughtful and obviously proud, pinned a presidential combat citation on the unit colors. "We are not going to fail," he told the Marines. "We shall succeed." Later he issued a word of warning...
Although Crow offers no letup in the agony and gore, it should win Hughes a new and wider following. In it he parcels out human history and legend in a succession of charnel-house episodes. The Garden of Eden, Oedipus, St. George, all our prototypes of beauty, heroism and love, are reduced to so much pulsing, thrashing sinew, murderously intent on survival. A harsh and one-sided view, to be sure, yet difficult to deny. The headlines are on its side. Hughes is too cunning a craftsman to try to convey his vision in headlines or rant of any kind...