Word: nouveau
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Austrian rocker, designer anonymous, manufactured back in 1860. And yet that ancient rocker, tendriled like a vine from the wine-heavy hills around Vienna, had a brisk, bald-bottomed rival in Charles Eames's up-to-the-minute en try in molded Fiberglas and wire. An art nouveau desk (circa 1903) by Hector Guimard that looked as sinuous as weeds under water held its place against a rigorously rectilinear chair by Le Corbusier...
...nouveau clocks cluttering the Square are frail and glittering pretenders to the throne. Their blinking and bonging and groaning of the hour mark the passage of those who remember what it meant to race south down Divinity Avenue, glance up, and be reassured that it wasn't too late to get lunch. And for the few who remember, their time too is running...
...Sloan Wilson, the man who did more for gray flannel suits than Brooks Brothers. The novel's key setting is Pine Island, Me., a summer retreat and a kind of "perverted Garden of Eden from which one was expelled for the sin of poverty." Among the unexpelled nouveau poor are the Hunters, who eke out their stay as genteel innkeepers. Fortyish Bart Hunter is an existentially minded drunkard whose most cutting insult is to call someone "cheerful." His disillusioned wife Sylvia once took him for a big social cheese, but now knows him for an ineffectual mouse. Their...
Outdoor Amours. When another family, the nouveau riche Jorgensons, turns up in the harbor on a rented yacht and takes rooms at the inn, the Hunters go into a tizzy. Ken Jorgenson is a hearty Midwestern manufacturing tycoon, but years before he was a lowly swimming instructor on Pine Island, cruelly taunted by the rich young summer crowd. Ken's whiny wife Helen is a cellophane-wrapped neurotic, untouched by life. Their 13-year-old daughter Molly is an adolescent sleeping beauty waiting to be kissed into existence. The kiss comes, of course, from Johnny, but before that...
What lends the book its interest, despite shortcomings, is a scattering of mixed-blood, split-level aristocrats, culturally nouveau riche but genealogically ancien régime, and some well-described scenes of a dismal garrison town with bored military wives and senior officers well past their World War I prime. Above all, there is the unusual setting. Despite the fact that Novelist Dohrman, 29, has spent only one week in Haiti, he manages to convey that the jungle to him is partly D. H. Lawrence's "blood-consciousness" and partly O'Neill's "dat ole davil...