Word: riche
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...story, J.B. is a rich, admired, modern American industrialist with a devoted wife and five fine children. Then disaster looms and mounts; J.B.'s children are senselessly killed or brutally murdered, his possessions are lost, his house is destroyed, his wife goes away, his body sickens. All this happens against a crossfire of commentary, Biblical and profane, between Zuss and Nickles, a crossfire that continues as the stricken J.B. wrestles with his soul, with his Comforters, with his God, until at length his health is restored and his wife returns...
...serious vein, there is the calm, careworn father, his hand in groceries, his mind with God. There is the blunt, slangy, kindly matron who wants to marry everyone off; the professional matchmaker, with his human goldbricks and his spiel; the absurdly natty, paunchy, rich upstart. As they cluck, strut, brag, fib, fence, they have no great personal identity; they spill over indeed into caricature. But they boast a sort of tribal flesh; their pretenses and deprecations and denials are bequests from a world of hard competition to a world...
...Lance was the pawn in one of the longest and bitterest custody fights in café society history. During the course of his tumultuously abnormal upbringing, he seemed destined to develop a taste for high life and supercharged women. Instead, he devoted his energies to fast cars. While other rich young men danced and drank the night through, Lance got his regular eleven hours sleep, spent waking moments soaking up know-how from veteran racers...
FROM THE TERRACE, by John O'Hara. The biggest (897 pages), most ambitious novel of a writer who takes himself more seriously than it is possible to take his most recent books. A potentially nice rich kid from O'Hara's Pennsylvania runs short on character, presumably because of the sins of the father and the social disarrangements of his own time. The O'Hara ear for speech has the relentless giveaway of a tape recorder-but it reels on too long. Head and shoulders above the year's run of the mill, but still...
MARLBOROUGH'S DUCHESS, by Louis Kronenberger. A topnotch biography, continuously rich with the shine of a fabulous period, provides a full-dress portrait of an 18th century woman whom no one could underestimate until she overrated herself...