Word: nacreous
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...subconsciously loves Alfred's trust fund about as much as she does Alfred. Eaton shortly abandons the sky for "The Street" (Wall) and later bars Mary from his bed but not board after she has an affair with an ambisextrous psychoanalyst. Alfred in turn is smitten with a nacreous 22-year-old named Natalie, and thus begins a 16-year-old triangle that develops many more than three angles. The secrets of the bedroom have always been the worst-kept secrets in O'Hara's novels, and the pages of Terrace are crammed with knowing sinnuendo...
Boschesque crustaceans of his hermetic imagination to caress the tentacular algae of his subaqueous and electrified impudicity or the nacreous and colubrine doves of a psychosomatic idealism to circle in simmering syndromes the facades of a palladian narcissism." Yet he can go from there to a superb review of William Faulkner's latest novel and the fairest, most graceful estimate yet of Fellow Critic Van Wyck Brooks's work. Sometimes his literary snobbishness leads Wilson into his most readable and most amusing writing. "Ambushing a Best-Seller" will make readers of the trashier kinds of historical novels blush...