Word: mistressful
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...fair game. Nothing is more common, he wrote, "than to find these creatures one week in a good family and the next in a brothel. This amphibious life makes 'em fit for neither, for if the bawd use them ill, away they trip to service and if their mistress gives 'em a wry word, whip they're at a bawdyhouse again, so that in effect they neither make good whores nor good servants...
Colonel Steinbaum is a humanitarian. He works for the Third Reich, but he hates it. For one thing, his Jewish mistress has been hauled off to prison. For another, he is sickened by the brutality at the concentration camp where he is stationed. Steinbaum is on the verge of joining an anti-Nazi conspiracy when he makes the mistake of going to a party held by a high Nazi official in an elegant château. The symbol of Nazi Germany, Author von Abele suggests, is not an armed camp or an insane asylum but this grand, lurid party...
When the marshal wanders off to bed, Steinbaum tries to salvage some self-esteem by seducing the marshal's 22-year-old mistress. But it is she who brutally seduces him. "Now here you are," she tells him, "and you aren't Papa, and I don't need to be afraid of my position with you, so I use you a little, I play with you." Just so has she played with all the marshal's flunkies, as if she were the marshal's accomplice in debasing them. In the grey, foggy dawn, Steinbaum staggers...
...privilege to identify. There is this tycoon, an old Walter Huston type, rich enough to dig a two or three hundred million dollar fur-lined funk hole under his Connecticut Shangrila. There is his nice ginny wife. And (what larks in the ark in this subterranean Ararat) his mistress. A Jewish nuclear physicist clever enough to work the survival gear and brave enough to make like a space comic hero in an asbestos suit along the hot galleries of the shelter. The tycoon's blonde daughter. The tycoon's colored butler-old-fashioned enough...
...illuminate a modern hero's death with myths. Updike slights Prometheus, and his book surfers. The reader learns little more than that Peter is bright, has psoriasis (the vulture's peck, presumably), and that as an adult he is a second-rate abstract painter with a Negro mistress...