Word: prig
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...brutal picture, with a core of horror imbedded in its accounts of mere hell-raising. All but one of the principal characters are fairly scarifying as future warriors or even as future citizens. There is a blabbing prig, a conniving misfit, an ingratiatingly evil Jocko De Paris (Ben Gaz-zara), a master of midnight ceremonies violent enough to mean court-martial and expulsion...
...Lineal Prig. The lovers of the story are François de Séryeuse, a young Frenchman of good family, and Mahaut, Countess d'Orgel, descended from the old Creole nobility of Martinique, the wife of the Count d'Orgel. When the story begins after World War I, Mahaut is scarcely more than a child and is deeply in love with her husband, a man of 30; "in return, [the count] showed her much gratitude and the warmest friendship, which he himself mistook for love...
...Count d'Orgel, in fact, was a lineal prig, living & breathing for social ritual The Orgels met François de Séryeuse at the circus one night and invited him to lunch. Soon he and Mahaut were talking about their childhood lives in the country. François words refreshed her like a gift of wild flowers...
...actively evil, but merely weak, his wife has retreated into a cocoon of neuroses. His brother-in-law is a shiftless drunk who pretends he can write, and his journalist daughter is a loveless prig. Sands's first homosexual buddy, a stage designer, has left him for a theatrical producer. His second, a young bookshop manager, is in the clutch of a possessive mother. Bernard Sands feels superior to the shoddy lot until he sees a fellow homosexual dragged away by the police-and suddenly feels ready to side with the law and "join the hounds in the kill...
...lame at the finish. As before, Novelist Buechner carries a minimum plot load, but the gravity of his theme is enough to make him stumble. He sets himself two problems that have tripped up better novelists: 1) to etch the profile of a saint without making him a prig, 2) to make a religious experience ring with the homely authority of an alarm clock...