Word: comical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...three women in Father's Day have been left by their husbands. Their responses define their temperaments and personalities. Louise (Susan Tyrrell) is brash, her language is raw, and she is a comic spitfire. She is still in a towering rage over the divorce and harbors delusions of winning her husband back from his present wife...
...brothers are met to sell off an attic full of old family possessions. This brings in the character who saves the evening. Gregory Solomon (Joseph Buloff) is a marvelous comic invention, a wandering Jewish trader who has spent most of his 89 years in the universe of used furniture...
Tuggle's approach to his tale is refresh ingly hardheaded; he does not bother with psychological attitudinizing, superfluous subplots or forced comic relief. Once he has introduced us to his characters, as well as to Alcatraz's labyrinthal layout and elaborate security procedures, he unveils his puzzle: How do a few unarmed, heavily guarded cons break out of a maximum-security fortress surrounded by the treacherous waters of San Francisco Bay? The answer to this question proves to be as ingenious, precise and exciting as one might wish. There are no fudged details or deus ex machina plot...
Edwin Newman's comic novel about a skinny English prizefighter who spouts economic theory when struck is what used to be called folderol. As folderol goes, it is on the airy side, and even for airy folderol, it lacks substance. A prospective reader should be warned that the author, perhaps driven to dementia by his efforts to persuade Americans to speak English (in Strictly Speaking and A Civil Tongue), retails a joke about an Oriental fighter named Kid Pro Kuo, "who gave as good as he got." And that one of the characters, a fight manager named Fogbound Franklin...
...Manhattan lurk Billy's sister Abby, who clomps "the treacherous hike from the bathroom to the kitchen linoleum" in hiking boots; his twice-divorced mother; and her balding lover Henry, whom Billy catches poring over nymphet glossies in a porn shop. Epstein is at his best with fresh comic perceptions of growing up absurd in a multiparent home. He is at his weakest in describing Billy's moony infatuation with Zizi, which leads to the novel's adolescent denouement...