Word: mordantly
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...defied good sense and good taste, fiction has been a major beneficiary. Yale-educated Michael Thomas, who at 46 has had successful careers in both milieus (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lehman Brothers), has distilled from the darker lunacies of these worlds a novel of crackling humor and mordant observation. Its bigger-than-Barron 's protagonist is Oilman Buford ("Bubber") Gudge IV, who has been content to nurse his multibillion-dollar fortune in the Texas Panhandle until lust and vengeance propel him forth like a plague of pissants...
...like trying to till a field with knitting needles. Cyril Connolly would not have made his own list. He wrote his line about writers we might miss in a minor book called The Unquiet Grave (1944). He died in 1974. But open the book now, in 1982, and his mordant, elegant light pours out of the volume, alive, into the eye, the waiting, conscious mind...
...skills-how to avoid being cheated, how to cross borders. They come back in a daze of wonder. But even today's writers who travel are remarkably good: Paul Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar), Edward Hoagland (African Calliope), Jonathan Raban (Old Glory: An American Voyage) and the splendidly mordant V.S. Naipaul...
Like father, like son? The question barely survives the interruptions from the author's richly mordant characters: Dutch's lover, Judge Martha Sweeney, who kept her virginity until she was 31 and wears a .38 under her judicial robes; Father Hugh Campion, a "celebrity priest" who won $100,000 on a quiz show and went on to star in Father Hugh's Kitchen, "the highest-rated cooking program on the air"; Private Detective Marty Cagney ("Discreetly determining what was done-where & with whom"), who compiles the adulterous dirt on Dutch's exwife; Cagney's daughter...
...More in A Man for All Seasons. For the first time, Spelvin is more than baffled. He feels a chill of apprehension, and rightly so, as he hears the stage directions: "The Executioner will be played by himself." When the curtain rises on curtain calls, Spelvin does not. This mordant conclusion echoes that of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Man is a simple soul inadvertently entangled in a blind mess called life with nary a clue as to its meaning and no aid from a Seeing...