Word: lusted
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WITHOUT MARX OR JESUS, there's still lust; erotic desire galvanizes the nightmarish sweatglistening discotheque and toilet-stall world of Andrew Holleran's first novel. The title, of course, comes from Yeats' "Among School Children," as does the epigram, and the book emerges from Yeats, admixed with desire: desire, the force of the gyre spinning Malone and Sutherland and their coterie, binding them to the center till it scatters them like a merry-go round gone haywire; desire, the lesser mythology in the absence of religion, that turns the X's on a suicide note from crosses to kisses...
...neighborhood was now the perfect counterpart of his inner state: Its filth and ugliness corresponded to his lust...
John Updike, happily, has gotten out in time. For 20 years Updike and his mellifluous prose have wandered through suburbia, exploring the desiccated guilt and lust of the well-off with a familiar eye. Updike, to be sure, became master of the art, rivalled only by John Cheever, but his recent novels had lost their fire--less compelling, almost tedious, they droned on, as if to say You have read my life so many times before, what more can I say? The painful autobiographical power of Couples petered out to a sense of dry boredom in A Month of Sundays...
...Updike the vehicle of a biting, driving wit, a brilliant farce that together lambastes America, the Soviet Union, radicals, bureaucrats, poets, capitalists and, of course, lovers. Being Updike, the author retains enough of his obsession with bedroom mores and manners to fill the book with ruminations of love and lust, the foibles of marriage and the freedom of adultery--but happily, these are only a small percentage of the whole, ornaments rather than the centerpiece. This is a book with larger visions than that...
...third grade at P.S. 166, that august institute of lower education on West 89th St. where I majored in messing up my desk, I learned several things. The first thing I learned was that love is cruel. This insight came when Miss Witzman, homeroom teacher and object of my lust, announced her intention to marry at year's end. Marry someone other than me, that is. I learned the second thing when fractions wormed their incomprehensible way into my arithmetic textbook. Math...