Word: ironist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...nerve endings, while that level flute pours silence drawn from striped pools. Gilbert Stuart's Flautist is a man cut off from that silence, from wife and children, village, home. He sits soulnaked, haltered in other men's finery. Stuart, the master ironist who gave us a grandmotherly George Washington, here portrays a burnt-cork-face minstrel in reverse. This is a handsome black musician masked, glassed, in a transparent nightmare of snow white. The score before him is withered moonlight. The snakes who wove a raft to carry him have fled away beneath the sea. He holds...
...rising would fail, until a mood of fatalism set in and the old warlike mockery became heavily larded with cries of lament and self-pity: "Poor Wexford, stript naked, hangs high on the cross,/With her heart pierced by traitors and slaves." The warrior, the lugubrious drunk and the ironist all took up residence in the same skull...
...been "mentioned" for the Supreme Court. He is well sketched by the author, and one impudent touch is superb: Mannix has a deaf son, she relates, and thus has learned to lipread. To know what is being whispered at a testimonial dinner is to be an ironist, and Mannix is one. As he leaves the dinner to exchange ruefulnesses with an ancient Virginia jurist, the reader looks forward to a wry tour, perhaps in the Edwin O'Connor manner, of the world of liberal politics and conservative finance in which the old Jewish and old WASP families...
...asphalt Iroquois called the Raiders. The book follows Albert and his heroes-a splendidly underprivileged crew of dirty-cut young men-through a wild summer day in the Brownsville streets. The action begins with the formal curbside cremation of a dog's carcass-very satisfying to Albert, an Ironist-and ends with a terrifying game of ringalevio, or tag, Albert's first fist fight, and a brisk one-alarm fire...
...novel as well as the curative powers of love? Yes, but her occasional barbs are more like twinges of a habit not yet kicked. This is a well-written and well-meant novel of lovers gone astray but saved by love. If more is meant, Iris Murdoch, a gentle ironist, conceals it too well...