Word: joy
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...latest in the recent flurry of American editions of Joyce Cary is "A Fearful Joy"--a whirlwind story and a humorous report on four generations of England...
...marry her, yet he appears again and again through her marriage and divorce to bounce her on his knee and ask for a pound or two. She gives him the money and more than that, for Bonser is Tabitha's personal revolt, and her only consistent pleasure, her joy...
...conversational. Except for the first seven pages, the story is written entirely in the present tense, which gives it the quality of a synopsis. That is precisely what it is: the synopsis of a whole block of English history, told through the life of one woman. "A Fearful Joy" avoids the monotony of a synopsis, however; Cary chooses his incidents well, and his story is well-paced...
...fine disregard for the conventional flow of time. He can dismiss a war or a death with a sentence or two yet spend pages on a picture of Tabitha disciplining her child. This makes for a breathless narrative, intentionally short on description and drama. But although "A Fearful Joy" rolls this narrative past its readers in a headlong rush, it stops frequently to breathe, to question, and to laugh...
This wild burlesque of English literary life is the best thing in A Fearful Joy. Gary trots out a weird but wholly likable crew of eccentrics and fakes: the rich "angel" who is afraid of being taken in and afraid of being left out; the lazy sponger with an uncanny eye for the latest thing in letters who privately believes that modern writing is "so rotten that it may be good, in a rotten way"; the scraggly poet with "a thin virgin beard" who preaches that "the true decadent has no modesty...