Word: gothicized
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...most remarkable aspect of Director Robin Lynn Smith's production is the showcase it provides for Kathy Bates, 37, who since her Tony-nominated performance in 1983's night, Mother has firmly established herself as one of the nation's foremost character actresses. Although Bates is capable of gothic comic excess, here she underplays the mother as a frustrated housewife, aware of a larger world of culture and glamour outside somewhere but awkwardly uncertain about just what she is missing. Bates perfectly balances the ruthless selfishness of the mother's ambitions, and her shameless attempt at larceny to fulfill them...
...everything the world loves about France. Water gushes from stone cherubs on its Beaux Arts fountains as mothers sit in the sun, watching their small children spin gleefully on a painted carousel, to the sounds of My Boy Lollipop. Picture-perfect vineyards announce the town's current prosperity; a Gothic cathedral and 13th century chateau commemorate its noble past. Just 265 km from Paris, the gateway to the bucolic Loire Valley, Angers offers four museums, a feast of theater and music, and canoeing on nearby Maine Lake. "This isn't the overcrowded Paris suburbs," sniffs Angers' deputy prosecutor Herv...
...thing he did was teach a college course on the theme of failure in the American novel. Not so coincidentally, Carpenter's Gothic is about losers in a competitive society. Gaddis reveals his characters in snatches of dialogue: "--Will you listen to me? Trying to tell you they're taking you to court here, anybody comes to the door don't open it. Stumpp serving a summons on you some seedy process server comes to the door tell them a mile away, some down at the heels hopeless looking bastard they get seven dollars a summons he has to hand...
...action of the novel is restricted to the McCandless house, located in a Hudson River town not far from New York City. The design of the residence is carpenter's gothic, "a patchwork of conceits, borrowings, deceptions... a hodgepodge of good intentions like one last ridiculous effort at something worth doing even on this small a scale." This description is a key to Gaddis' own architecture: a self-conscious scaling down of his earlier books, in which issues of decline and fraudulence were elaborately developed...
...childhood: a local handyman who always walked down stairs backward, a tornado that sucked his grandmother up through a garbage chute. When he was 9 years old, Rips watched a circus acrobat plunge to her death from a 50-ft. pole. (Naked Lady shares a kind of adolescent gothic vibe with Frank Conroy's excellent Stop-Time...