Word: cliches
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...word around the corral is that with his new novel, Nobody's Angel, Thomas McGuane rode into town, swung open the doors of the saloon and single-handed transformed the saddleworn clichés of Western fiction. The irony is that McGuane's fifth novel is his first set in the West. The Sporting Club, his debut, occurs up in Michigan, Hemingway country, while his best novel, Ninety-Two in the Shade, takes place in Key West (again Hemingway turf), where McGuane lived and worked. Although McGuane, 42, moved to Livingston, Mont., in 1968, he has not mined...
...fabrics by pattern, texture and color so that clothing takes on for a second the quiet shimmer of a 17th century Japanese print. Surprising combinations of garments-leather pants as part of a suit, a long jacket over foreshortened slacks, a vest worn over a coat-that scramble clichés and conventions into a new and effortless redefinition of style. A functional celebration of fabric. A reshaping of traditional geometry with witty contours, sudden symmetries and startling vectors. A new sort of freedom in clothes. An ease, the Armani ease. And that, as we say in French, is just...
...Jackie beachballs, deranged assassins-all are strip-mined for significance. The performers (excepting Reed Birney as a gentle, doomed aristocrat and Natalija Nogulich as Danilo's one stalwart love) display little charm, conviction or screen presence. But the intensity of Tesich's obsessions can ennoble his clichés about love of family, friends and country. And Penn, a poet of domestic sexual tension, stages illuminating vignettes to express what the script or actors cannot: a spasm of violence at Danilo's dinner table; the elegant tangle of lovers on a summer beach, with a third figure...
...taken a little too straight out of Erik Erikson, or even Gail Sheehy, and the plot verges on the melodramatic (it takes a boating accident to seal the bargain of friendship between the generations). But emotionally On Golden Pond is no less valid for being something of a cliche. Anyway, the characters are so strong that the piece does not play as a cliché. Hepburn, for example may have a less chewy part than has Fonda, but the briskness of her manner, her well-justified image as a no-nonsense individualist who is nevertheless a good sport, serve...
...means of making us see afresh the processes and fantasies, the obsessions and failures and triumphs of a very great artist whose work we assumed to be familiar. Who does not know Auguste Rodin, given that reproductions of The Kiss and The Thinker are the very furniture of cliché? Yet this exhibition shows us what we did not know. It brings forth not the debased Rodin of popular culture, or Rodin the herald of a modernism he did not live to see, but the actual artist, embedded in the 19th century, soaked in its values and yet struggling...