Word: gaumless
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Words won her the Pulitzer for The Shipping News, no question. The novel itself doesn't really track. The main character is gaumless in the first chapters and a functioning human male at the end, simply because the author has decreed a character transplant. But Proulx's language does not admit "yes, but" or "really?" When it works, which is most of the time, it sweeps aside all ideas, her own and the reader's, and allows no response except banging the hands together. Without this mad blaze of confidence, her next novel might have been a hanky dampener. Accordion...
...truth is that his figures and animals never benefited from their awkwardness. His horses are spindly, half-seen nags, and the dryads, babies and damsels in his decorative paintings are boneless stereotypes. Ryder's attempts at decoration -- mirror frames, screens and so forth -- look naive and gaumless compared with the more polished work of Tiffany or John La Farge. Ryder was not sophisticated enough to rival them, while as a Realist he was stumped by a lack of curiosity about the actual, resistant world. You know at once that Ryder spent no time looking at a body and analyzing...
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