Word: pagans
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...used to be a children's romp, before the scares of chocolate-covered razor blades. Long, long before that, it was a religious occasion for their pagan elders, and now it has been taken back by the grownups-masks, costumes, witches, jack-o'-lanterns and all. Increasingly in the '80s, Halloween has become an escapist extravaganza for adults, a trickless treat that more closely resembles Mardi Gras than the candy-and-apple surfeits of yesteryear. This year's celebration will be the most raucous ever, lasting four or five days in some places, a virtual Halloweek...
...cannibal galaxy-in astronomy, one of the vast colonies of stars that devour smaller galaxies. The cannibal stands for Europe, devouring its Jewish citizens. Such out-of-the-way images spring naturally from Ozick's prodigious erudition. This novel, like her earlier short stories and novellas (The Pagan Rabbi, Levitation, Bloodshed), is dense with metaphor, often drawn from the rich Jewish resources at her command: the Hebrew Bible, the Midrashim, or Jewish homilies, and the mystic texts of the Kabbalah. At the same time, as The Cannibal Galaxy demonstrates, she navigates the currents of other world cultures with...
...local color. She provides a narrator (called N) and the English village of Ennistone (N's town), the site of an ancient hot spring where residents and tourists gather daily to bathe and socialize. Legend maintains that this spa has aphrodisiacal powers and was once associated with pagan rites of Venus. Vigilant congregations of Anglicans, Methodists, Catholics and Quakers keep watch on the "unholy restlessness" that periodically seizes Ennistone, a madness lately exemplified by reported sightings of flying saucers and the peculiar behavior of George McCaffrey. The town does not take all the speculation about the automobile incident lightly...
Despite Gould's exertions, this June cannot compete with certain earlier hymeneal splendors. The '60s and the '70s were the great epoch of the improvisational, personalized wedding ceremony-preferably performed in a sun-shot meadow, the bride barefoot and vaguely pagan, Chloë going to Daphnis...
Gore Vidal's novels, plays and essays can be divided roughly into three areas of animosity. The first is the author's belief that Western civilization erred when it abandoned pagan humanism for the stern, heterosexual authority of the Judaeo-Christian patriarchy. See Julian, his 1964 novel about the apostate nephew of Constantino the Great. The second area that draws Vidal's scorn is American politics, which he dramatizes as a circus of opportunism and hypocrisy. See The Best Man; Washington, D.C.; Burr. The most freewheeling disdain is directed at popular culture, macho sexuality and social pretensions...