Word: crackup
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...iguana of the title is a giant lizard leashed under the veranda and clawing for its freedom-just as Shannon, the defrocked minister, is roped to a hammock during a mental crackup. Shannon and Hannah, the spinster, dominate the play, and break through to each other as they struggle with fetters of body and spirit. He tells her how he was locked out of his church for "fornication and heresy-in the same week." His revenge: loveless lecheries with teen-age girls, one of whom (Lane Bradbury) claws at his door with embarrassing anguish. Hannah tells him of pathetic fingertip...
...mano a mano with death, was expected to return to the ring by month's end; and West Germany's pugnacious pacifist, Evangelical Church Pastor (and World War I U-boat Skipper) Martin Niemoller, 69, who, while vacationing in Denmark, suffered near fatal injuries in an auto crackup that killed his wife and housekeeper...
...Charrier, a pretty young man married to Brigitte Bardot, and some friends behave with what they fancy is abandon: they dig le jazz, say "so longue" to each other, and crack up cars. All that need be said of Cheaters is that toward the end of it, after a crackup, a surgeon utters that immemorial line from the U.S. Old Wave: "I'm sorry. There was nothing more we could...
Rabbit, Run, by John Updike. A powerful and relentlessly depressing story about the crackup of an unspeakable Hollow Man whom the author perhaps mistakes for Everyman...
Author Updike tells his depressing and frequently sordid story with a true novelist's power. His too-explicit sexual scenes are often in the worst of taste, but his set pieces describing Rabbit's crackup, his confrontations with wife, family, mistress and imploring minister show some of the surest writing in years. Up to a point Rabbit, Run seems to be saying that this is what much of life in the U.S. is like; certainly Updike's scene and people seem too threateningly typical. Yet the real weakness of the book is Rabbit...