Word: plush
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...PLUSH (615 pp.)-Guy McCrone-Farrar, Straus...
...Victorian Age, Red Plush is one of those placid novels that wallow in family trivia, delight in minor, certain-to-be-resolved family crises and snicker at family eccentrics. The family is accorded an existence of its own, dominating and dwarfing the individual characters; it becomes a sort of metaphysical entity, unexplored and uncriticized, that remains firm and true, regardless of the peccadilloes of its members. The reader is therefore seldom aroused about the fate of any individual Moorhouse. For even if erratic David were to choose the wrong bride (though he does not) or if moody Phoebe were...
...Plush records the gradual social ascent of the muttony Moorhouses during the Victorian Era: their little intrigues, their innumerable dinners and tea parties, their meandering, witless conversations and their damp love affairs. (Like all good bourgeois, the Moorhouses reject the wild delights of love for the solid comforts of money and status...
There is an honorable tradition of family novels in English literature, but McCrone is sadly unable to muster any of the gentle, needling satire of Jane Austen or the fierce jaundice of Samuel Butler or the sensitivity to social change of John Galsworthy. Red Plush reads as if it were written by a Moorhouse himself...
...Duke & Duchess of Montoro, married last fortnight in a Seville ceremony surrounded by a splendor of plush and fine feathers (TIME, Oct. 20), arrived in Manhattan on their honeymoon, looking glad to be out of it all even if they were the daughter of the Duke of Alba and the fourth son of the Duke of Sotomayor...