Word: mother
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Victorian predecessors, Storey remains outside his characters, looking in; he avoids interior monologues, allo ing the feelings of his characters to surface in their words and actions. Colin is the focal point of the novel--Mr. and Mrs. Saville are always referred to as "his father" and "his mother" even when the antecedent is unspecified--but Storey refuses to lose himself in a single point of view, preferring the role of a restrained omniscient narrator...
Colin's story begins before Colin's birth--in the mysterious wanderings of his older brother Andrew. Between Andrew and his mother there exists a bond religious in intensity: he is "both a trophy and a burden, she the successful recipient and suffering host." Her suffering reaches its apex when it turns out that Andrew's persistent excursions from home have an otherworldly goal; after his death of pneumonia, the longing for escape which was his by nature is projected onto Colin by his ravaged parents with a fervor which is again religious...
...eludes Colin is all about him, in Storey's precise depiction of the fictional world he inhabits. The effects in Saville are rarely obvious; our passport into Colin's dilemma is understatement and the slow accumulation of detail. Storey uses strings of adjectives almost lovingly. Writing of Colin's mother, he says: "It was as if her life had flooded out, secretly, without their knowledge, and she some helpless agent, watching this dissolution with a hidden rage, half-apologetic, half-disowning." It is this dissolution, the steady draining away of life and resolve, which afflicts so many of these characters...
...greenhorn like Smitty, you either let others push you around or you learn fast how to push them around. Queenie, a very funny, cynical character played with perfect wise-ass sureness by Steven Johnson, gives Smitty a crash course in this special language of protection: "Queenie's your mother," Johnson tells him, "and everybody needs a mother." Later Queenie leaves on a visit to the General's office, and Smitty is cornered by Rocky, whom John Alden plays with a slightly forced cockiness. Rocky lays out two alternatives to the rookie: either Smitty lets him become his "old man" (sexually...
...flowers were so nice and pretty and yellow, I wanted to take them all and give them to my mother," a pedestrian said yesterday, adding, "I think they were tulips but the men weren't exactly tip-toeing through them...