Word: netherworld
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...Power and the Glory, it was the Mexican jail cell that swallowed up the whisky priest. In A Burnt-Out Case, it was the jungle leper colony that drew Querry, the architect who has lost the very capacity to feel. In Brighton Rock, it was that violent urban netherworld where hopelessness is almost a beatitude...
...four acts are one long mad scene as Renata pursues the count through the back alleys of her subconscious. Along the way, there are magic potions, a séance, rattling skeletons, a furry sorcerer and assorted gnomes to contend with. Even Faustus and Mephistopheles, coming on like a netherworld Frick & Frack, get into the act. Mephistopheles produces a bouquet of flowers out of the air, and pops a little boy into the oven. Sighs Faustus: "Don't you ever get weary of the same old tricks?" Renata does. Having flogged herself with a whip, she enters a nunnery...
...tuned in on the less guarded secrets, but always a floater on the periphery, always a nose pressed against the glass. This is Rojack (and Mailer his shadow), much too hip to swing with the squares, but too close to power to call himself an outcast; doomed to a netherworld of liberal intellectuals, never in the back rooms with Mr. Big nor safe on a midnight street in Harlem...
...peculiar and original genius of Novelist John Cheever to see his chosen subject-the American middle class entering the second decade of the Affluent Society-as figures in an Ovidian netherworld of demons. Commuterland, derided by cartoonists and deplored by sociologists as the preserve of the dull-spirited status seeker, is given by Cheever's fables the dignity of the classical theater...
...created in his novels and stories as Shady Hill, Bullet Park or Proxmire Manor, the suburban region is subjected to terrible metamorphosis. It is not Sing Sing Prison straddling the New York Central tracks by the Hudson shore that is the worst destination of the inhabitants, but a netherworld of damnation. In Metamorphoses, one neighbor has suffered a magical transformation into Actaeon, torn to pieces by his own hounds. In another story, his wife has become the enchantress who converted her daughter into a swimming pool. Even the A. & P. supermarket has been peopled by Cheever with a crowd "moaning...