Word: christiane
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Donleavy's central character is Cornelius Christian, born in Brooklyn, reared in the Bronx, and returned from the continent, sporting cultured manners and accent. With good looks, and erratic opportunism, Christian is the type of figure that the image of cold, yet capricious New York is built around. He communicates by shock. Flattering several matrons in an elevator by immediately identifying them as members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, Christian informs them that one of them has certainly stepped in dog excrement. In the park, he systematically picks out obese women to ask them if they want...
This is what suceeds in the big city, at least for a time, according to Donleavy. Fresh off the boat from the continent, his wife having died on the voyage, Christian lands a job with the mortician who buries her. The mortician is impressed by Christian's good looks. On one of his first assignments for the funeral parlor, Christian is willingly seduced by Fanny Sourpuss, the young widow of an old multimillionaire garment manufacturer. Sued by the widow of a rich corpse that Christian has butchered in the embalming, he wins the suit by charming judge and jury. Women...
...different kind of cross." Friedan avoided dogmatic issues like birth control and divorce, maintaining that "the meeting was the message." But she did have one real ideological problem: whether she should cover her head. Rejecting what she described as a symbol of women's inferiority in Judeo-Christian culture, Betty compromised on a non-hat hat-a headband...
...Christian's New York is alternately tempting and repulsive, "one monstrous insult to the delicate spirit." A funeral director gladly offers to forget the bill for burying Christian's wife if he will come to work as a front man at the mortuary. An industrialist thinks he can use a little class in the jingle department...
...these opportunities come to bad ends because Christian's outrage keeps breaking through his overcourteous exterior. He tells off brand-new widows who complain about their dead husbands' makeup. He is too quick with his fists, which are surprisingly effective. Yet Donleavy's New Yorkers are thorough professionals, blunt and disturbingly honest about their own illusions. Unfortunately, Donleavy is rather slippery about his own illusions. The city, he seems to be saying (especially when he pumps his prose full of Celtic twilight), is no place for a wandering Christian...