Word: misfits
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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MORGAN! A misfit artist tries to woo back his divorced wife by behaving like King Kong in a hilarious, offbeat comedy that might easily run amuck except for polished clowning by David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave, two of Britain's showiest young stars...
Warner, as Morgan, catches every kink and twitch of a natural misfit who can only sense progress when he is swimming against the stream. In his world of fantasy, he is brutal, primitive. To the world at large, he looks rather more like an adolescent giraffe perpetually swallowing the lump in his throat. The real world gains on him when, armed with several lethal weapons, he confronts his rival, "a greasy art dealer," and hoarsely croaks: "She married me to achieve insecurity-you can't take that away from her!" The point is almost proved by Vanessa...
...Prix de la Nouvelle Vague in 1959. That book told, with almost clinical clarity, of the inexorable destruction of a young woman who surrenders herself to an insatiable, mad alcoholic. It is not likely that Rochefort's new novel will win any prizes. Celine is a casually wicked misfit who cannot abide middle-class posturings. So she marries Philippe, a stuffed middle-class shirt who is "obsessed with the Absolute the way some people are with golf." Middle-class sex with Philippe only accentuates Celine's boredom, and so she drifts into some high-class sex with...
...characters are caught in emotional suspensions that have no geographical limits. Gradwell, in The Pet, hates the bulldog kept by his white employers: "Symbol of all the white man's savage glee in turning the black man from his door." But the dog is something of a misfit himself: he refuses to bark at strangers, ignores the bitch brought around for mating purposes. He is indeed a great, slobbering, sheepish failure "always conscious of wrongdoing." Hate turns to sympathy, as Gradwell recognizes his kinship with this other outsider: "He broke off a piece of bread and threw it, saying...
These ten stories steer misfit characters on wildly futile tacks toward identity. They are contemporary fairy tales, dreams embedded in urban concrete and spun from the thoughts of people who could not conceivably exist. But beneath the deceptive surface lurks the insistent point that reality and surreality are separated by no more than a crack in the sidewalk. Ishmael Ramos, for instance, is a young Puerto Rican who works in the boiler room at the Columbia University gym and for whom reality is wearing an undergraduate's outfit and rooting for Columbia's football team. He does...