Word: mother-in-law
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Cruel Mockery. The day of his arrest began as a normal, busy family day. While Solzhenitsyn worked, his mother-in-law looked after his five-month-old son Stepan; his two older boys, Yermolai, 3, and Ignat, 16 months, played in the park near by. As dusk fell, seven policemen entered the building and hurried up the stone steps to Apartment 169. Solzhenitsyn's wife was told that the men wanted to talk to her husband. Their leader announced that he had the authority to take Solzhenitsyn with him ?by force, if necessary. "There were seven of them," Natalya...
...mother-in-law takes you to the spring to wash. She loads her burro with plastic bags full of clothes, in case it rains early, and sets off across the fields with her nieces, nephews, and grandchildren. She re-does your wash after your inadequate job and then her clothes and yours join the bright pattern on the smooth rocks. The little children make a game of washing, and romp through their day's work. The babies are strapped to the nearest tree in home-made hammocks of blanket and rope, safe from stray snakes or spiders...
...fact, the most considerate character in all of De Vries' 17 novels. An intermittently employed actor, Smackenfelt begins his good works by servicing his id-his bestial Freudian self, whom he calls Blodgett. It lusts after Ginger Truepenny, who is not exactly Smackenfelt's mother-in-law, but close enough. She is the aunt who raised his orphaned wife Dolly, who spends most of her time writing plays. By such tasteful amendments does De Vries remove the curse of incest without seriously weakening the underpinning of his situation...
...native ground Peter De Vries, in Forever Panting, is off again, a touch more vulgar than before, word-playing his way through another marital war. This one includes a husband who develops a yen for his surrogate mother-in-law. John Cheever and Bernard Malamud have collections of short stories, both domestic, the one (The World of Apples) waspish and suburban, the other (Rembrandt's Hat) Jewish and urban. Evan S. Connell Jr., once more roving far from the Bridges of Kansas City, has produced Points for a Compass Rose, a poetic meditation upon the pain and perplexity...
Marriage to Cousin Franklin seemed a lucky break, but Mother-in-Law Sara turned out to be a meddlesome tyrant, and Franklin himself had a few flaws as a husband. To this list we can now add a posthumous problem for Eleanor: her son Elliott seems bent on committing the equivalent of literary matricide...