Word: rancidly
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...letters begin with the boy's notes from Phillips Exeter, where young Rufus had gone on a scholarship. He is reading and liking Beau Geste, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, finding Sinclair Lewis "turning rancid'' in Elmer Gantry, moving on to the discovery of the "terrific" Ernest Hemingway (who does, however, earn a boy's stern moral disapproval as "one of the crowd of degenerate Americans who settled . . . in Paris after the war"). Dreiser's English is "bum," and John Dos Passos rouses a boy's puritanism with the "unalleviatedly filthy" Manhattan Transfer...
Bloomfield's novel, which despite its ostensible subject matter is not the least pornographic, leaves its readers impressed but dissatisfied. The author has stated intelligently the case against goodness gone rancid. But too often the moving finger, having writ, fails to move on; instead it remains bonily pointing out a moral or explicating a word derivation. Some of this is helpful, but the reader is spared the invigorating effort and delight of discovery...
...tiny Swiss mountain village of Unterwasser, near the Austrian border, live people with names like Tsering Ken-chock, Tashi Samdup and D'Olma Doji. Instead of being apple-cheeked blonds, they are brown-faced, black-haired, almond-eyed, and smell faintly of rancid yak butter...
...find their fate in the ugly shadow of suspicion that divides their kindred. Unhappily, the literary parallel, though it lends the piece a certain spurious redolence of tradition, proves a pathetic fallacy. Shakespeare's lovers seem silly in the gilded palazzi of romantic old Verona; in the rancid tenements of unremitting megalopolis, West Side Story's lovers seem simply unreal and finally uninteresting...
...jolly but self-indulgent romp. And as, amid shenanigans, there comes a sudden stab to the heart or a surface shot that plumbs the depths, it is perhaps easy to make too much of it, to find its anarchic flings an assay of an ill-governed world, its rancid taste an assault on respectability. Less than a philosopher and more than a buffoon, Behan is chiefly an insatiable human being. He is no one's cup of tea who recoils from finding it sloshed into a saucer, no one's humorist who, for being outraged...