Word: glacial
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Mental Fig Leaves. Hero Brad is a paper shuffler at SHAEF, and a first lieutenant. Haunted by the glacial respectability of his New England future after the war, he wants to have an adulterous fling while he can. But his low-level imaginings rarely embrace anything more than a brief, businesslike interlude with a party girl. Instead he meets Val, the grave-eyed brunette daughter of an invalided British brigadier, fully Jane's social opposite number and twice as good-looking. They fall immediately and desperately in love, and exchange guilty confidences about his wife and her friend Wynter...
...himself by putting a steely armor on and letting his heart freeze up. By war's end, Harding has surrendered because he no longer believes that creative man can ever win. He settles tamely into a snug U.S. professorship. "The Faculty had no idea that it was a glacial shell of a man who had come to live among them, mainly because they were themselves unfilled with anything more than a little academic stuffing...
...what if the shape changes because of the rise of mountains or the accumulation of glacial ice? In this case, says Gold, the axis will shift to take account of the new distribution of mass. Slowly, the plastic earth will swell in the proper places to make itself a geoid again. When this process is complete, it will settle down with its North and South Poles in new places. Gold figures that modest crustal changes could make the earth turn 90° in less than 1,000,000 years, relocating its poles on its former equator...
Gold finds it somewhat harder to explain why the earth's axis is not migrating appreciably at present. He suspects that it may have been caught in a "trap." The axis tends to shift, he thinks, toward the region where glacial ice is melting fastest, moving one of the poles toward that same region. The climate there gets colder. The glaciers grow thicker. Then the axis and the pole move slowly back again...
...which the phonies have inherited the earth. Pronouncing a scarcely original, but nevertheless grandiose, anathema, he finds everyone corroded through the decline of love and the absence of Christian faith. Rangy in setting (New England, Greenwich Village, Paris, Spain, Italy, Central America), aswim in erudition, semi-Joycean in language, glacial in pace, irritatingly opaque in plot and character, The Recognitions is one of those eruptions of personal vision that will be argued about without being argued away. U.S. novel writing has a strikingly fresh talent to watch, if not to cheer...