Word: lifeless
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Nabokov lingers over the coincidence of the encounter, but his timing is nearly perfect. By drawing it out, he sharpens the anticipation of the impending adultery; before long, Martha, the frosty doll, and Franz, promoted from lifeless lump to "warm and pliant wax," can't get enough of each other...
...Lifeless Lump. Franz first encounters his uncle and aunt accidentally in a train compartment. They are unaware of his identity, as he is of theirs. Not a word is exchanged between him and them during the entire trip from his small home town to Berlin, where he will work in his uncle's department store. Dreyer idly casts a professional eye over the young spectacled passenger, sizing him up by the low quality of his haberdashery. In Martha's peephole of a mind, Franz registers as little more than a lifeless lump...
...Australian cartoonist, Oliphant got the hang of U.S. politics and effectively ribbed the presidential candidates of that year for the Post. Today he appears in 130 other papers. Ironically, he won a 1967 Pulitzer Prize for one of his rare solemn cartoons. Ho Chi Minh, holding the lifeless body of a Vietnamese amid the smoke of war, proclaims: "They won't get us to the conference table . . . will they?" A more recent cartoon of Oliphant's on the war is much more in character. L.B.J. and Dean Rusk sit in diver's suits at a table resting...
...then "already involved in the Black Struggle.... I was a socialist, but with a syndicalist or anarchist orientation." He "polemicized a bit" against the club system. "It was a training ground for the Southern aristocracy...stabbing one's friends in the back. I thought they were all so lifeless, so...bland, and so one dimensional...
...woman, and winds up no woman at all and only half a man. Three other new novels share with Myra her/his/its preoccupation-or experimentation-with artificial sex. But unlike Myra, which is redeemed somewhat by Vidal's satirical skill, these books have the lifeless neutrality of assignments thought up by publishers' accountants and carried out by literary conscripts. They not only fail to exalt, amuse, enrage, inform, misinform or anesthetize; they also fall short of truly satisfying grubbiness...