Word: plonking
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Then throw it in the wastebasket. Hortense Calisher, a novelist (False Entry, Textures of Life) and short-storyteller of formidable skill, has unaccountably produced in Journal from Ellipsia a prodigious intellectual plonk: the autobiography of a-well, maybe it is a Hegelian monad, maybe it is an unborn soul, maybe it is a visitor from outer space, maybe it is just something the lady ate. Whatever it is, she writes about it in a style that combines the least admirable characteristics of James Joyce and Henry James with a Hortenseness all her own, and she writes about...
...Mare ain't what she used to be. Nevertheless she is, as the French say, green-which means, as the Americans say, blue. The plot, for example, involves a Rabelaisian family feud in which the antagonists fight to a finesse and take each other's wives. Best plonk: when a farmer finds a stranger dossing down with his dairymaid, he bawls indignantly, "Be off with you! I can handle the servants without outside help...