Word: conceit
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...Benchley's fictional conceit that a Great White Shark of mythic size and ferocity has veered out of its normal deepwater territory and begun to pot-hunt off the swimming beach at Amity, L.I. The creature kills a young woman who is swimming alone at night. When bits of her body wash ashore the next morning, there is no mistaking what has happened, but the town fathers persuade Police Chief Martin Brody not to close the beaches. After all, it is the beginning of the tourist season, rentals are lag ging anyway, and with luck the thing will rumble...
...BLACK CONCEIT...
...serious novel these days are fear of banality and a horror of sentiment. However skillfully they are written, there is often not enough at stake in contemporary novels to keep the mind and heart alive. Two of the most encouraging exceptions this year were John Leonard's Black Conceit and John Gardner's Nickel Mountain. The two books are also in a sense contrapuntal. In one, reality destroys illusion. In the other, illusion is accepted as a means of protecting love...
...head of a pun, with a little room to spare. That quality has helped make him one of the best popular critics going, as well as the editor of the New York Times Book Review section, but takes some getting used to in Leonard's fiction. In Black Conceit, for example, Leonard offers three different major characters: New Englander Kenneth Mackenzie Coffin, a young Wasp of means, qualms and wavering commitment to the New Left; Coffin's brilliant wife Marcy, a nice enough Texas girl caught in the coils of biology and history, who is not unfairly described...
...author manages to bring off a remarkable range of scenes and situations, from academic Cambridge to the black underbelly of Roxbury (where Ken teaches awhile) to an orgy involving the apple pickers, a family Civil War sword and a death by drowning. Under the black comic claptrap in Black Conceit is a deeply felt, uncompromising book about an idealist's disappointment that human nature does not prove perfectible, that human decency, liberally applied, cannot suspend the law of the jungle. "We go on making choices, after the original helplessness," Coffin reflects, "and ultimately it becomes our fault...