Word: pipping
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...think she's very pretty," says poor young Pip of the slightly older Estella. "I think she's very proud." Extraordinarily pretty and proudly defiant: that was the indelible first impression the 17-year-old Jean Simmons made on moviegoers in David Lean's Great Expectations in 1946, at the beginning of a long, full career that lasted from her early teens to her death on Jan. 22 at 80, in Santa Monica, Calif., of lung cancer. The actress's screen impact in her early flush of stardom could also be defined by another pair of clashing adjectives that...
...triangular face dominated by large eyes and high cheekbones leading to a small, voluptuous mouth that could be sullen or amused. Her attitude promised a challenge to any man who would seek to love or tame her. That's clear in the 1946 Great Expectations, where her Estella calls Pip a "coarse little monster" at one moment and says, "You may kiss me if you like" the next. She steals Pip's heart, and breaks it, with the same cool smile...
...take her there), she's the innocent blossoming into sexual joy. That emotional unbuttoning is something the actress had rarely been allowed to portray in her early roles, except for The Blue Lagoon. As Estella, for example, she is selfishly pleased with the shattering impact of first love on Pip; here a Simmons character gets to experience the sunburst of that poignant rapture on herself. She sings, dances (with much more abandon and expertise than in Black Narcissus) and gets in a fight with a Cuban tart...
This territory could get mawkish fast but for the muscular energy of Keegan's prose. It works in bursts--short, punchy clauses and chapters--and Pip's voice is wryly comic, even when events turn tragic. When things go well, she's gloriously, darkly intuitive. (Here she is on the Olympic podium: "The national anthem starts to wail, creating a dreaded musical pressure in my chest as the flag slowly rises in a celebrating-the-dead kind of way. Something churns and my mind says: Wow! This is exactly like a giant funeral!") And for a world-class swimmer...
Keegan is smart about where she roots the suspense in her novel. Pip's Olympic quest may be ripped from Michael Phelps' headlines, but we don't have to sweat a photo finish. We know she'll get gold from the epigraph, a quote from her coach that's another deliciously ironic swipe at the double-edged sword of accomplishment: "If this exceptional athlete wore all the Olympic gold medals she has won in her long career and jumped find a pool, she would sink." What we find out is how much Pip's triumphs cost and how they change...