Word: pulsebeat
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...thus becomes a receptive but essentially passive observer of a garish, deadly world, living, as he puts it, "in the very pulsebeat of the tabloids." He freely enters Mob-owned nightclubs and elegant, exclusive brothels. When no one, including reporters or federal agents, can find Schultz, Billy is allowed into his presence: "It is spectacular enough to see someone in the flesh whom you've only known in the newspapers, but to see someone the newspapers have said is on the lam definitely has a touch of magic to it." The young apprentice also learns that "I had caught...
...only simplifying history, not distorting it, to suggest that on May Day 1627, the struggle for the American soul was settled once and almost for all. Score: Ants, 1; Grasshoppers, 0. The devil had been unmasked as the imp of play, the demon who made song and dance the pulsebeat of life. And so the men in the gray Puritan suits went their unmerry way: sober, industrious, thrifty, starkly Protestant, with absolutely no use for Maypoles. For Maypoles meant not only untrammeled festivity but something of larger significance: rituals. And rituals meant not only feelings and passions but coded repetitions...
Farce is tragedy out for a good time. Its characters miss disaster by a pulsebeat (What if the husband had peeked behind the door? What if the policeman had knocked a minute earlier?). Its situations are improbabilities made tantalizingly possible...
...trollop named Daisy Battles, played by tawny, toothsome Julie Christie, who has a decorative role and makes the most of it. But the girl who steals out of O'Casey's pages into Cassidy's heart -and gives the whole film a persistent, throbbing pulsebeat-is Nora (Maggie Smith), the shy, strong-minded colleen who finally takes leave of him because "I need a small, simple life-without your terrible dreams and your terrible anger." Actress Smith makes even reticence seem a powerful emotion...
...WEST, by Frank Norris (362 pp.; Harper: $3.95), proves once again that imitating J. P. Marquand is tricky business. The danger: instead of capturing the hypnotic quality of Marquand's even-tempered prose, the writer may find he has only reproduced Marquand's low emotional pulsebeat. In this 1957 Harper Prize Novel, Author Frank Norris* does not quite get out of this Marquandary. His hero, George Hanes, is cut to the Marquand measure; he is an Ivy Leaguer (Princeton '01), a professional man (architect), unhappily married, and an ineffectual struggler against the leg irons of convention...