Word: joylessly
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...hears a kind of call to freedom in the court's ruling. But he gets it garbled, comes to think of it as a call to arms and, in the book's least effective chapters, answers it by ostentatiously dating an unsavory white girl. This grim and joyless effort to "push things" pulls the family into trouble, and the father into a not altogether plausible tragedy...
Ella grows up to a joyless marriage to a decent local grocer. She tends store, she raises her nephews, she keeps house and plays bridge when she has to. But her neighbors bore her, the birth of a daughter fails to enrich her unsmiling nature, and neither good times nor bad, drought nor plenty seem to offer any real excuse for living. Author Siebel kills off her characters with adding-machine indifference. Mother goes. Then the favorite nephew dies in World War II. Finally, Ella herself methodically swallows a bottle of sleeping pills, rinses her water glass, and lies down...
...shine up the ancient story of boy-mates-girl. Author Halevy, a 35-year-old New Yorker, scores his first-novel romance with a bustling big-city sound track. Subway doors snap shut like guillotines, shreds of dirty newspapers swirl along the avenues instead of autumn leaves, a joyless Village party gets high on marijuana and low on clothes; and all the time the two lovers sleepwalk their poignant way between the steel-and-glass monuments and the human ruins...
...Novelist Joseph Conrad, the Congo River was "an immense snake uncoiled" curving through "joyless sunshine into the heart of darkness." There was plenty of darkness in the Congo during the igth century "scramble for Africa," when Baudoin's great-granduncle, Leopold II staked out his monarchical claim to the uncharted Congo Free State. Leopold's rubber gatherers tortured, maimed and slaughtered until at the turn of the century, the conscience of the Western world forced Brussels to call a halt...
After the finale, Teacher Smith led his pupils onstage. They heard Proprietor Harold Minsky, pleased and professorial, boast: "It was a fast show. Good pace. No milking the acts [i.e., stalling for extra applause]." Teacher Smith hastened to remind his students that 1954 burlesque is merely a joyless corruption of the art of the '10s and '20s when the girls wore tights and such top comedians as Phil Silvers and Fanny Brice actually burlesqued Shakespeare and the opera. True burlesque. Smith declared, is dead...