Word: gothic
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...SINGULAR MAN, by J. P. Donleavy. Graves, ghosts and cryptic portents of the Gothic novel transposed in Joycean prose to contemporary Manhattan, funny even when deadly serious...
...first of the Schatzkammer's ten rooms stands a gaunt, Carolingian ciborium, or altar canopy, wrought in gold for King Arnulf of Carinthia about A.D. 890. The vitrines of other rooms continue the historical procession, running from Gothic goblets through High Renaissance amphorae etched with centaurs to a Napoleonic nécessaire-an elaborate Empire traveling case designed for Bonaparte's second wife, Marie Louise. By way of exotica, the Munich Schatzkammer has a brace of bejeweled Ceylonese chests, Persian daggers and Turkish scimitars, Ming porcelains set in Renaissance gold frames, a Mexican stone mask embellished...
...known as the Municipal Art Society. The book's 100-odd photographs, notes Brendan Gill in his foreword, constitute a "veritable Kama Sutra, or manual of instruction, in the wooing of this incomparable city." They also provide a fascinating guide to the paroxysms of borrowed styles-Greek revival, Gothic, Georgian, Italian Renaissance-that afflicted and sometimes ornamented all U.S. cities before they finally achieved in the skyscraper an architectural statement of their...
...Smith a mighty man is he. But what is he doing in a modern novel? This is in fact a Gothic novel cropping up after a lapse in taste of a century or so, and Donleavy's Smith is the once familiar Byronic hero, the diabolically fascinating doomed aristocrat...
Like its original, the modern Gothic novel is prone to interest in tombs, graveyards, menacing strangers, cryptic portents, castles and ghosts. These are all present in A Singular Man, cleverly transposed into the idiom of contemporary Manhattan and ancillary Fairfield County. Smith has a great marble mausoleum under construction, air-conditioned, flood-and earthquake-proof. Smith moodily lurks there from time to time. The ghosts are of the contemporary autobiographical kind-Smith's own spectral guilty memories acquired in a posh Jesuit prep school. The furies are represented by the Press. Evil is represented by the abandoned power-bitch...