Word: condoned
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...Condon's great and nourishing strength has always been his mania for mania. The mushy midsection of the human-behavior range has no interest for him, and ordinary psychosis not much more. What grips his imagination, and shakes it till splendid words fall out, is the tic of a human bomb. In one novel, a beautiful woman feeds for 20 years on the high-held hope that she will one day, somehow, be able to chop up her lover with a machete. In another, a man sets out, in more sinister fashion, to learn by heart every last scrap...
Mile High at first seems a normal Condon fancy. After growing up in turn-of-the-century New York with a good head for compound interest and the delicate ways in which money and muscle affect politics. Eddie West, the son of an Irish immigrant, brings about Prohibition singlehanded. His reason for doing so is that Prohibition will provide business opportunities. This is instantly understood by "the 18 greediest, the seven most hypocritical and the five wealthiest families in the country." to whom he goes for financing. It is also understood by an elderly and dignified Sicilian, who agrees that...
MILE HIGH by Richard Condon. 364 pages. Dial...
...hideous possibility exists that Richard Condon has committed allegory. This saddening and unlikely conclusion is what remains after the reader has discarded all ordinary explanations for Mile High. The fine, demented gleam in Condon's eye has become a glitter, like that of a health-bar sign observed through the bottom of a celery-tonic bottle. All who fondly remember The Manchurian Candidate and Some Angry Angel will lament...
Wrong Dream. They might be, except that Condon loses his balance and -odd for him-goes off the shallow end. For the first time in eight novels, he wavers from his delightful obsession that maniacal rigidity is civilization's main motivating force and therefore the only human quirk worth a novelist's attention. He begins to worry solemnly about what went wrong with the American Dream. One of the results is a lengthy mumble that goes like this...