Word: joylessness
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Once a year Sol Nazerman's joyless routine is unset. His family had died in August, and each Summer, like the recurrence of some odd tropical disease, the memory of their torture returns to him. Sol's nights become long, sleepless nightmares; during the day, to the astonishment of his Puerto Rican apprentice, he fumbles through business in a trance, unaccountably appraising brass as gold. In one such August, the pawnshop is robbed; the apprentice-whom Author Wallant. with a disturbingly heavy hand, has called Jesus Ortiz-steps in front of a bullet meant...
Then he tackles a case too tangled for any brief. Sheila is a shimmeringly lovely, self-centered neurotic. The pain of their dissonant relationship becomes his joyless pleasure. Yet at novel's end, unhappiness binds them ever more tightly, having awakened a mutual profound pity...
Your article on the joyless Spanish painters and sculptors, whose colors-black and white, dull greys, somber browns, putty greens you call the colors of joylessness, fails completely in trying to link their work to a Hollywood version of sunny and passionate Spain...
...take a job with a woman who is a tyrant but at least leads a recognizable life: mistress of the house but subordinate to her husband, the master. Through Erminia's desertion. Irene comes to see that tedious family convention is not necessarily more depressing than her own joyless burden of freedom...
...three marriages, the latest still intact but more testy than tender; an estranged college-age son who loathes him; a foreclosed career as a brilliant young cinemactor; the faces of friends who died in the Spanish Civil War or at the talent-poisoning wells of Hollywood. The anodynes are joyless-alcohol, sleeping pills, the humdrum routine of his NATO underling post in Paris, which is good work, he feels, but not greatly good...