Word: cheerlessness
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Gass published his fine first novel, Omensetter's Luck, two years ago, when he was 41. He shares James's pragmatism, his commitment to form and to the senses, his cheerless affirmation willed out of an all too obvious despair. The despair seems to rise from the conclusion that ultimate answers are beyond reach; Gass puts his faith in the structure of his prose and the intense physicality of his words. Death imagery crackles through these pages like winter wind through a cornfield, yet the characters have exceptional vitality. A youth watches with unblinking fascination as a farmhand...
...truth to tell, is cheerless in Evergreen. Women are not so much to be loved as abused, and the varieties are impressive. One writer, E. F. Cherrytree, candidly reveals his special hangup: a passion to see women fighting each other, the bloodier the better. "It's my biggest sex pleasure and has been since I was four. I'm 35 now." Evergreen illustrated this treatise with a few pages of sketches of two shapely girls, one blonde, one mauve, going at it tooth and claw. The piece evoked considerable response, says Rosset, all of it favorable. "We really...
Charlie (Wallach) is a failed vaudevillian; Harry (O'Shea) was a scoutmaster until his penchant for boys was discovered. On a cheerless Sunday evening in the dismal London suburb of Brixton, they are in their barbershop giving each other the full tonsorial treatment. This Sunday is particularly cheerless, since Charlie has been summoned to trial for "impersonating a female" in a club known as the Adam's Apple, and may face a jail sentence. Since the confrontation never does take place, the play's electricity is static: tingles of apprehension but no real voltage of menace...
...nage à Quatre. An autobiographical mood-and-memory piece, the play's setting is a cheerless gin mill somewhat reminiscent of the bar in Saroyan's The Time of Your Life. The narrator hero (Warren Berlinger) recalls how from earliest childhood he had been brought to the bar night after night by his mother (Betty Garrett), who is driven by a masochistic thirst to watch her butcher husband (Warren Gates) while away the evenings with a waitress floozy (Peggy Pope). In her firmly devoted way, the mother believes that the boy should get to know and understand...
...Streeter works too hard at Puck. He is too often heard gasping supreme ecstasy and his "Lord, what fools they mortals be," is, like the rest of his part, produced with excess force. Towards the end of the play he relaxes more than he should and falls to a cheerless drone...