Word: melodrama
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...some particularly weird moment in the latest installment of the Great American Melodrama, I had a consoling thought: well, at least it can't get any worse than this. Maybe it was when Howell Heflin, playing Senator Beauregard Claghorn, was in the midst of some bloviation, the point of which seemed to have escaped him. Or maybe it was when Orrin Hatch, playing Perry Mason, revealed that a key piece of evidence, a pubic hair, actually appeared on page 70 of The Exorcist and therefore couldn't possibly have been in Clarence + Thomas' Coke...
HARLOT'S GHOST by Norman Mailer (Random House; $30). This huge (1,300-plus pages) novel starts off briskly with some Mailerian melodrama and metaphysics and then bogs down in a recapitulation of one man's life in the CIA from the middle 1950s to the early '60s. It ends with the three most ominous words in recent American literature: "TO BE CONTINUED...
This long opening riff is fine and engaging, comparable to the best passages -- fictional or otherwise -- that Mailer has ever written. Harry's narrative sails forward on a river of Scotch, melodrama, sex, paranoia and typically Mailerian metaphysics (Harry knows why his waitress-girlfriend was so pleasant to him the first time she worked his table: "She saw money coming in all kinds of emotional flavors. It took happy money to buy a dependable appliance"). At the end of all these pyrotechnical effects, which include a persuasively real ghost in Harry's basement, the hero has achieved some pressing problems...
...final passage (Woolf aptly calls it her "peroration") is out of character with the rest of the play. The crisp sarcasm and dry humor deteriorate into slightly forced melodrama and moralizing that have very little Virginia Woolf in them...
...couldn't happen to a more deserving fella. Loesser would tell you that. As brash as any gravel-gargling high roller from Guys and Dolls, he was famous for telling his singers, "Loud is good," and he applied that maxim to his professional life. For Loesser, a song was melodrama in miniature: he loved the counterpoint of two hearts and voices in seductive competition, as in Baby, It's Cold Outside and many other contentious duets. They were an expression of his own tumultuous personality. During Guys and Dolls rehearsals, exasperated by Isabel Bigley's tentative attempts...