Word: prolix
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...short, fat, gap-toothed, messy, and, according to one contemporary, had "the face of a pantler, the general look of a cobbler, the girth of a barrelmaker, the manners of a hatter." Estimates of his work were hardly more flattering: Sainte-Beuve dismissed his style as "prolix and formless, slack." The author of La Comédie Humaine, that panorama of post-revolutionary France, died up to his chins in debt to his mother, wife, sister, mistress, gardener and the village constable in Ville-d'Avray. Now the world stands heavily in Balzac's debt...
...rebels and imagining he is out of the ruck and into the luck. Sillitoe was always a careless writer, and now that he is crassly cashing in, he is grossly sprawling out. He is inaccurate: "They were attracted like two magnets in a field of iron filings." He is prolix: "Frank kicked him, a hand cracking on flesh, and the purple, spark-fanged floor on the sway and loose burst at Keith like a piece of ice over the eye-face. Keith reacted, fist bursting, a whalehead driving across the light, packed with flintheads and darkness." He is even ungrammatical...
...carefully written group scenes, the distillations of a life that could provide several plays. One just doesn't listen to Quentin's speeches, and his generalized guilt becomes real only in what is now the largest of dramatic commonplaces, the mass murders of Nazi Germany. Quentin's prolix introspection provides only relaxation before the next rise of tension, the scenes that are the play's reality. As such, After the Fall is a dramatist's tour de force, but not a live play...
...booming voice that heroines are not often virgins heroes are not usually gentlemen. He did not necessarily punish the wicked. Indeed, in Dreiser's novels good and evil do not exist-there is only unheroic suffering and scrambling for success. In retrospect, his prose seems clotted, clumsy, pompous, prolix, humorless, flatulent and dull. An American Tragedy ran to 385,000 words ("250,000 of them unnecessary," snorted Mencken). Nevertheless, Dreiser's dogged honesty and ruthless candor opened the way for all the social realists of the '30s (many drearier than Dreiser) and also...
TINY ALICE, by Edward Albee. Life is a many-symboled thing in this opaque play of the post-Christian ethos. Paradoxically, Alices only emotional vitality stems from Christian symbols and experience. The language is sometimes eloquent but often merely prolix. The cast, headed by John Gielgud, is a marvel...