Word: crackup
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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...
...Airlines pilot was rolling his 707 down a Miami runway. Suddenly one engine flamed out. Though the plane was within three or four knots of critical takeoff speed and thus technically should have aborted, it looked to the pilot as if such action would almost certainly lead to a crackup. Making his decision in an instant, the National pilot kept going, lifted the plane off the ground, circled around and landed safely. Still, an accompanying FAA flight inspector filed a complaint against the pilot for rule-book infringement. Though A.L.P.A. Boss Sayen hammered away at FAA's rigid judgment...
...what future Ph.D. candidates will say of him, shoots back, wadded into spitballs, most of the unfavorable reviews he has received, and reacts with the fury of an upstaged diva to a photograph he considers ill-chosen. In effect, what Mailer has produced is a record of an artistic crackup. By the early 1950s the spare, controlled prose of The Naked and the Dead had turned sour and turgid, and its author was drifting in a haze of liquor, seconal and marijuana. Mailer has stopped using "the minor drugs," he says (although he believes that after a few more years...
...takeoffs. Often they fly smack into an airborne craft. They have dived into propellers, smashed against expensive radomes, causing about $300,000 damage a year. Far worse is the ever-present danger that a Midway albatross may someday really clobber a $6,000,000 plane and cause a fatal crackup...