Word: madding
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Shakespearean theater company, stage left, complete with a Romeo techy named Riley (Eric Roberts). Cassie joins acting classes to escape her monotonous life, but pretty soon she's performing as Juliet offstage as much as on. If she can just cut away her town ties, and trust her slightly mad Romeo, Cassie may find happiness in L.A. But of course that's easier said than done...
...novel reads like a breeze, and its strength is Arensberg's spoofing of two ostensibly glamorous worlds, publishing and theater. The author once worked as an editor at Viking Press, and she writes of the industry with affectionate exasperation. There is a wonderful Mad Hatter editorial meeting, propelled by reasoning of the most tangential sort. There are the elusive editors who dread authors as "walking vessels of petty grievance and conceit." An especially funny cameo is Allan Schieffman, the macho editor who boasts to Frances that "Norman Mailer had punched him in the stomach, an affectionate punch, and a tribute...
...characters of mother and daughter are completely overshadowed by the story's half-mad protagonist, serpentile in his stealthy pedophilia. The mother, meanwhile, is reduced to the stereotype of the hypochondriac nag, while the daughter--behind the violet mist of the poetic physical description--is no more than a cute, slightly buck-toothed kid on roller skates...
THOUGH HE IS no Humbert, the chilling "enchanter" is engaging in his own right. Like other protagonists in Nabokov's work, the precise, thinlipped jeweler is probably mad, as he indulges more and more in his wolvish fantasies. Yet, at the same time, his constant introspection reveals a natural need for self-justification and an odd paternal longing...
When is a housewife a mad housewife? Perhaps when she tries so hard to be the perfect housewife. When she devotes virtually every moment to making her home a spotless museum of domestic art. When she scrubs a kitchen floor that already gleams like a Versailles mirror. When she obsessively dusts the TV set's rabbit ears and the leaves on her rubber-tree plant. When she spends hours preparing nouvelle cuisine dishes as meticulous as a Magritte. When she finds spiritual and even sexual fulfillment in her dogged servitude. When she renounces friends and hobbies to remain the model...