Word: overwritten
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...other suburban satyrs and nymphs. "Adultery lit her from within," he wrote of one character, "like the ashen mantle of a lamp, or as if an entire house of gauzy hangings and partitions were ignited but refused to be consumed and, rather, billowed and glowed, its structure incandescent." Overwritten, perhaps, but in 1968 sex was a particularly American theme. As another Updike character said, "We're trying to break back into ((hedonism)). It's not easy...
Troublesome as such episodes have been, and wearying as its often sloppy, overwritten coverage can be, the Post remains the nation's second most influential paper. It reaches beyond White House handouts and glamorous legislative debates to probe scandals, follies and policy debates in obscure federal agencies. In this capacity it serves as an invaluable watchdog. Columnists Mary McGrory, Richard Cohen and George Will have mastered the art of arousing emotion without overlooking ideas. The paper's metropolitan staff brings much the same assiduity to the diverse politics of Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. The Post...
Poets are treated even more harshly than writers of prose. Chaucer, for example, unintentionally parodies himself with the overwritten "The Cook's Tale." And the droning profundity of T.S. Eliot is sent up by Henry Reed: "As we get older, we do not get any younger/ Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five,/ And this time last year I was fifty-four,/ And this time next year I shall be sixty...
...accurate and candid about himself as he is about everyone else, and over and over he owns up to occasions when his initial enthusiasm led him astray. An early version of Island Fling "really wasn 't good enough and was curiously overwritten," he decides. "I seem, in later years, to have lost my gift for economy. This has been, and in the future must continue to be, remedied." It is a rare writer who is his own best critic...
...REVISITED PBS, beginning Jan. 18, 8 p.m., E.S.T. It is an odd book by one of the century's oddest writers, and even he had serious reservations about it. "I reread Brideshead and was appalled," he wrote Graham Greene in 1950, five years after publication. But Brideshead Revisited, overwritten and underplotted, is and probably will remain Evelyn Waugh's best-known and most popular novel, a lush, sentimental tribute to Catholicism and to the period between the wars that Waugh regarded as the last gorgeous days of the British aristocracy. Now, in this lavish and beautiful eleven-part...