Word: janes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This novel is J.P. Donleavy's most sustained effort at social comedy. But his stylistic idiosyncrasies are geared to convey energy rather than reflection. The gaudy array of types who tumble through Dar cy's life are more remarkable than remarked upon. The works of Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh provide an object lesson here: if the subject of a novel is manners, the writer must be on his very best...
...lead women in the play--Charlotte Corday (Sarah Jane Norris), the upperclass young woman who murders Marat in his bath, and Simone (Robin Leidner), who keeps him alive until Corday's final blow--are both perhaps slightly too intense at the beginning to permit their characters to develop. The trick in Weiss's Marat/Sade is that the players must grow in the course of the play, gradually changing from lunatics to historical figures, blending one element into the other. Norris is a brilliant Corday at first, but because she begins her part with too much tension, she has nowhere...
Meanwhile, Alison tries to resuce her ungrateful daughter from Wallacia, a Communist satellite in the Balkans, where Jane has encountered the misfortune of killing two Wallacians in a car accident, earning herself a potentially open-ended jail term...
...hears the undertone of hatred in the voices of those who pay her the compliment. At more sanguine moments a feeling continues to haunt her that she deserves the blame for the tragedies that rock her loved ones, for Molly's cerebral palsy, for her older daughter Jane's traffic accident behind the Iron Curtain, for her sister Rosemary's breast cancer...
...have your nerve. You condemn William Safire for his "groaners" in the same issue [Oct. 3] that you commit "Sloops du Jour,'' "The Spy Who Came in for the Gold," "Growing Fonda of Jane" and, worst of all, "did not go gently into that good nightside...