Word: despairs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...this Miss Lonelyhearts succeeds in evoking the supreme negativity of West's vision, Teichmann's occasional soppiness notwithstanding. Because of the peculiar balance of this production, however, we don't even need to wait for the final curtain to experience the onset of despair. When Shrike, shrill as the song of the bird he's named for, tells Miss Lonelyhearts to "Get off this milk of human kindness bit," we wish the misguided kid would take his advice...
...stories contain little drama; the characters' search, and their eventual despair, is all quiet, internal. The Bishop of Ostergothenburg (Minnesota), who believes firmly in the hierarchy of authority but whose position is usurped by a cold, efficient assistant, doesn't go out in a blaze of glory. He is sideswiped by a truck and merely stays a while in the hospital, "doing fairly well for a man of his age, he understood, until he took a turn for the worse." And that's all. It is the understatement in these stories that make Powers such a master of his chosen...
...THIS DESPAIR that makes Look How the Fish Live so powerful. When every story leaves the reader feeling empty and bemused, it's hard to go on to read the next. Powers offers very little hope--the major character of each story slips quietly into resignation, accepting a society that negates faith and community. One of Powers's pastors, who tries hard to gain the acceptance of his curate and his (curate's) friends, holds forth as he feels a true father would. He fails to establish any kind of relationship, but in the course of his attempt he realizes...
...political stage, McMurphy may be acting out of idealism or he may have found a socially acceptable cover for profound psychopathy−or both. Kesey also understood that a belief in the possibility of rebellion is essential to modern man, a fallback position that can be taken up when despair threatens to turn into self-destruction. It is to restore that faint possibility for his fellow inmates that McMurphy ultimately acts without understanding what he is doing. The revolt he leads can only put him under the lobotomizer's knife. Instead, to keep hope alive, his friend, an Indian...
...never aspired to be a sex symbol, let alone Marilyn Monroe. In the end, trying to be a sex goddess can only bring pain and despair. If the career has not been based on a creative ideal, then where is that solid bit of your life?" −Shirley Knight