Word: elegiac
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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MOONCHILDREN is itself an elegiac treatment of the charms--as well as the costs--of the fabled put-on (a form first given definition by Jacob Brackman in the pages of The New Yorker not so many years ago). If you ever went crazy for the Marx Brothers, memorized Soupy Sales routines, religiously watched I Love Lucy and Rocky and his Friends, fell in love with Holly Golightly, you have an instinctive feel for the form. But Weller's not only concerned with the surface jests. They're there to be enjoyed ("Hey, you decided what ya gonna do when...
...said that success has deflected him from his sometimes invisible course. Unhappily, his books are constructed like tumbleweed. Moving On, the last one, was 794 arbitrary pages long, with no discernible direction. All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers is less than half that length. It is acute, elegiac, funny and dangerously tender, and in tone -if not content-more like a memoir than a novel...
...after they went to Los Angeles to become ballplayers to the stars. He also touches a lot of other bases, sentimentalizing about his newspaper days, describing the selection of his father's coffin, visiting the apartment buildings where cozy Ebbets Field once stood. The tone throughout is unashamedly elegiac, though not totally uncalculated. Kahn's love and respect for his subjects provide a sensitive measurement of the years - years that have seen football all but replace baseball as the No. 1 national sport. The change says a lot, because the difference between the two games is crucial. Baseball...
Baker can be bitter: "The sinister nature of the American soil is apparent in places like Gettysburg. Fertilize it with the blood of heroes and it brings forth a frozen-custard stand." Baker can be elegiac, as when he raises the tragic ghost of Abe Lincoln, who says, "A man eventually likes to see the record on himself completed and know that everything is fixed and that his life is in order. I groan every time an archivist discovers another hitherto lost Brady portrait...
...Jones pulls down his traditional Southern homestead traditionally -amid murder and suicide-he strikes the mood usual to Southern novelists: a coverall elegiac sadness. It is a bad time, he suggests, for all. His sociology, to judge by nonfiction accounts, is accurate. But what emerges is less a sense of history than a sense of style. The faultless hat is held over the faultless jacket over the faultless heart. All is stoic gallantry in a tradition that seems, at last, more correct than moving-a special kind of theater. And what is that exotic yet all too familiar sound...