Word: remorselessness
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Hello Out There? Ten years ago. in his first novel, Evan S. Connell created a brilliant portrait of one inhabitant of this psychic heartland, Mrs. India Bridge, mother of three, wife of a successful Kansas City lawyer. Written as a sequence of linked vignettes, Mrs. Bridge showed a remorseless accuracy and a comic sense powerful enough to reduce its subject to her feckless gist. (In the final scene, she has managed to get stuck inside her own garage. She is last seen tapping on the car window with the ignition key as she calls, to no one, "Hello? Hello...
...Negro successfully robs a bank instead of a chicken coop we can honestly claim to be emancipated." The speaker is a character in this flawed but forceful first novel. The scene is a Southern city in the 1930s. For the Negroes who dwell there in remorseless squalor, a measure of freedom and manhood can be earned only by breaking the white man's law. For a bright, ambitious Negro, the best way to prosperity is not through business or the professions but in the illicit sporting life: gambling and the rackets...
Cultured, leisured Europe before the War was in the tightening grip of the pseudo-evangelical conviction of its irresistible ascendance toward eventual glory. Europe divided, in Shaw's terms, into Heartbreak House and Horseback Hall, the remorseless chamber of realistic understanding, and the palatial funhouse full of languishing multitudes. The world, Shaw writes, "idolized love but believed in cruelty." The War razed this fetid cathedral only to leave a desolate stone quarry. The post-war legacy of prostration, humiliation, and shattered faces demanded new artistic speech. Old men morosely questioned the value of their life's work. Young men felt...
...reader who has earned his explorer's badge in trackless writing may have some initial trouble with such prose. Giuseppe Berto, whose writing career began in 1948 with an excellent war novel, The Sky Is Red, unveiled his new nonstop style in Incubus (TIME, Feb. 4, 1966), a remorseless account of a screenwriter's experience with psychoanalysis. Paradoxically, the method turns out to be better suited to a much more commonplace story, where radical style refreshes a traditional subject...
...army, the landed families and the church, he sees scant hope of any dramatic social or industrial progress-although he does grant that there have been genuine advances in recent years. He is acerbic about the humiliating political strictures imposed by the Franco government, deplores the abrasive, remorseless poverty that makes even the dogs in the provinces scrawny and unlovable. Though he shares the passion of so many norteamericano writers for bullfighting, he also exposes it as a miserably corrupt racket whose only honorable figure all too often is the bull...