Word: quinton
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...Kate Quinton is 80, and has lived most of her life as a sturdy, hard working, house-proud member of the lower middle class in Brooklyn. Crippled by arthritis and suffering from several other ailments, she is about to be packed off to a nursing home, a dread prison from which 75% of those who enter never emerge. Kate Quinton's Days, first published in The New Yorker, is the true story of the efforts, made largely by Claire, her partially disabled daughter, and some dedicated social workers, to help Kate come home. The return could not have occurred...
...Ludlam moves the melodrama with ferocious precision; this is high-voltage comedy, not low camp. But it is as an actor that this supernally gifted jacka-napes-of-all-trades shines brightest. All eight roles here (four male, four female) are played by Ludlam and his co-star Everett Quinton, with lightning-quick costume changes and split-personality voice throwing. Quinton as the maid skulks off stage right and 20 seconds later appears at the French doors as Lord Edgar. At the climax, Ludlam's Nicodemus struggles with Ludlam's Lady Enid-a true vaudeville tour de farce...
...first half of the novel is narrated by its protagonist, Willie Quinton, and begins with a setting of his early childhood at the idyllic country mansion called Kilnegh in County Cork; this is followed by an extended description of life at Willie's boarding school--a passage that is too long and distracting, and reads, with its contrived nicknames for masters (Mad Mack, Hopeless Gibbon) and standard schoolboy fare, too much like an inserted set-piece; finally there is the massacre which turns Willie's mother to alcohol and then suicide. This leads to an act of revenge that forces...
...disjointed dreams in which [she] was endlessly pursued by [her] parents' weeping"; for Marianne has left her comfortable home in England to come on a hopeless search and then long vigil for Willie. And she proceeds wanted, like Hardy's Tess, from one to the other of Willie Quinton's old acquaintances, repeating the refrain "I am going to have Willie's baby," which resounds like a death knell across rural Ireland...
...tragedy rolls on and is visited upon the daughter Imelda. Time accelerates, the narrative sections become more brief and informational, and there is only one resolution--a final tranquility--in the arrangement of Quinton bones at Kilneagh--"no matter how death came." And it is a sad picture...