Word: moralistic
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...crusty moralist in MacDonald -- familiar, especially, from his gratifyingly mordant asides in the Travis Magee books -- finally erupts when Rowan and his wife split up. Rowan castigates the self-sufficient woman his wife has become and complains that he wants his "compliant, noncombative, dependent, absorbed-in-me girl back." MacDonald responds with two long, tough letters describing Rowan's attitude as an "adolescent dream" and maintaining that his celebrity has given him an "iron insistence upon being totally right in all things." After this, does Rowan take MacDonald's well-intentioned scolding to heart and renew the friendship...
...thick-tongued speaker. But he is widely revered as a living saint, a man of courage and commitment who was always on the front lines. During the movement, he was arrested 40 times and beaten often. As an Atlanta councilman, he has set himself up as an unyielding moralist. "In some quarters they think I'm too honest, too open to be effective," he admits with pride...
Alas, it is true. James is a rare combination of amateur logician and sociologist, stylist, humorist and stern moralist. In fact, much of the joy of reading him comes from the extravagant spectacle of a first-rate mind wasting itself on baseball. Is baseball 75% pitching? No, it isn't, and James will show in a page or so that the proposition makes no more sense than saying "Philosophy is 75% God." Are the good teams the ones that bear down in the crucial final innings? No. The Cardinals and Blue Jays would still have won their divisions last year...
...would come to loathe me." By contrast, marriage looks positively seductive. Were this antic reversal all, Colwin could be categorized as an antiromantic romantic, half in love with the dreams she punctures. But the author, despite her subject and style, is that rarest of modern artists, a moralist...
This is the humor of an outraged moralist, a writer who takes his corruption and evil seriously. Much contemporary satire gets by on contrived conspiracies, abstract villainy and stock victims. The Building offers an older and more enduring view of human nature. Its characters get no points for race, religion, origin, social position or physical condition. Sin is apportioned without prejudice. The only salvation is madness or art, which may be the same thing. One tenant lectures to cockroaches; a painter cannot turn off his vision: "If he stops it will continue to come, escaping through his head into...