Word: explicit
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...daughter and the hired man are much better company, and the celebration of the sexual instincts which they represent borders, at its best, on comic poetry. But this erotic yea-saying degenerates in lesser moments into remarkably explicit single-entendre that is crude without being funny. Crudity seems, generally speaking, to be the defect inherent in Brecht's attempt to simplify life to the point where it can be described in his almost-allegorical terms. His characters are often lifeless stick-figures whose only identity is a label, and his political and social pronouncements are over-stated, over-emphasized, over...
Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley three times. By the time he was satisfied, the novel contained enough explicit love scenes and enough short Anglo-Saxon words to sate the appetite of the keenest pornographer. But is it pornography? The answer of literary people is no. Lawrence, a fretful neurotic always at war within himself, was a serious writer. But there is another question: Is Lady Chatterley dull and tiresome? This time the answer must...
McLaughlin, a journalist as well as a novelist (he is an associate editor of TIME), has an unerring eye for the Manhattan landscape, a faithful ear for the speech of the superficially smart. Although he never preaches, and the explicit statement of his theme never rises above the pitch of party talk, the reader is not allowed to forget the book's title; it would be a different story if any of the characters really had a notion...
...tell how she had conspired to have her daughter-in-law killed to reclaim the affections of her son Frank, an owl-eyed, 30-year-old lawyer who held hands with her in public, talked with a lisp, was known around the courthouse as "Wicked Wascal Wabbit." Most explicit of all the witnesses were two Santa Barbara ex-convicts, who testified that mother Duncan offered them $6,000 to kill Frank's pregnant wife. They lured her into a rented automobile, beat her into unconsciousness with a pistol, strangled her, then dumped her body into a ditch...
...acute intelligence pursuing a grand design. The book ends with a rise of tension as Nessim's brother, a naive savage armed with a bullwhip and a Messianic impulse, is brutally slain. Faithful to his belief that "truth is what most contradicts itself," Author Durrell fails to be explicit about the murderer. It may be Nessim, Justine, or even agents of King Farouk's lethargic government. Presumably, this cliffhanger conclusion will be solved in Clea, the last volume of the quartet, scheduled for publication next year...