Word: dexterities
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...exceptions are Leon's mother and Novelist Pete Dexter, 40, who in God's Pocket (Random House; 274 pages; $14.95) turns a random incident into a picaresque romp. Jeanie Hubbard Scarpato, still pretty in middle age despite a life that has "had more sorry chapters than the Old Testament," refuses to believe that the son she raised on her own from infancy after her first husband's death would simply let something fall on his head. Mickey, her current spouse, cannot disagree; he feels unworthy of Jeanie, probably with cause. He drives a refrigerated truck and sells...
...Author Dexter, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, piles on more complications and coincidences than his novel ought to carry. What saves God's Pocket from flighty sensationalism is its impressive ballast of local color. The fictional neighborhood named in the title is a white, working-class enclave in South Philadelphia that seems all too real: narrow houses, streets, lives; a place where the Hollywood Bar, the social hub of the area, does "half its business before noon." Some of the novel's best times are spent at the Hollywood. Mickey hears a drunken woman praise...
EVERY DAY during reading period. I trudged through Dexter Gate on my way into the Yard and to Lamont. One morning I glanced up at the inscription--"Enter to Grow in Wisdom"--and laughed at the irony as I crammed for my finals. Late that night when I left the library I tried to get out to Mass. Ave. by the same gate but it was locked shut "Depart to Serve Better Thy Country and Thy Kind" was the statement above the padlock, and that too struck me as an appropriate coincidence...
Last spring in London, John Dexter directed Rex Harrison and, as the sisters, Diana Rigg and Rosemary Harris in a production so dazzlingly elegant that the final, abrupt catastrophe seemed a nightmare from which the descending curtain would deliver the audience. Now Harrison, a strangely serene fatalist of a patriarch, has come to Broadway in Anthony Page's more earthbound revival. These are not Olympians playing at mortal games but overage children playing blindman's buff as the apocalypse closes in on them. Still, they are Shaw's creatures, and in this splendid, savory play they...
...getting into "a homicidal rage" when thinking of Hall: "Working for him was like working for Richard Nixon. Like Nixon, he always has a couple of underlings around who finish his enemies off by spoiling their reputations. I've talked to all of them-Laurence Olivier, John Dexter and Michael Blakemore [three of Hall's onetime colleagues]-and there is a unanimous feeling of righteous indignation...