Word: rootlessly
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Picturing a rootless, tangled world. Playwright Gazzo has an ear for the harsh and guttural, an eye for the tarnished and messy, and too much of a mind for both. So crammed is his scene with lives near precipices and gutters as to cry out for someone merely in a rut. His people, as they talk and philosophize, become embarrassingly florid. His heroine is both a Jazz Age and a Beat Generation type: the self-pitying, self-dramatizing, greedily restless girl who destroys others on the way to destroying herself. But the play's realistic-romantic approach...
...unifying theme, if there is one, is that of the heart's exile from the far country of its desires, a logical reflection of the physical exile of longtime Russian Emigre Nabokov. The uprooted, he seems to say. are more vulnerable than the rootless, for they are the victims of their memories...
Miri is a grave Greek girl with long black eyelashes and long brooding silences who goes to an eastern U.S. college. At a nearby school is her cousin Lexy-mercurial, unkempt, rude and life-intoxicated. Lexy's roommate Josh is well-rooted in America but emotionally rootless, blond, bland and sweet-mannered. Lexy, who has run away from his unscrupulous shipowner father, is pursuing a hero image of himself. He is capable of madly egocentric flourishes, as when he bets an ear against $20 on the turn of a card. Josh, who sees college as a succession of merit...
...diamond-smuggling hero is also employed by an oil company in Africa, and is another rootless, if educated, man. His disorientation fits neatly into the stifling heat of West Africa, where life consists of Copulating, making money to take vacations, drinking, and playing tennis. Hero Reed Hodgins meets misfortune because he wants to make more money than Africa affords through legitimate channels...
...best reply to Stevenson's rootless eloquence was not the presidential report or the imprecations of Republican orators. It was an equally eloquent passage from a speech made four years ago: "Until it [the atomic bomb] is subjected to a safe international control, we have no choice but to insure our atomic superiority . . . We can never yield on the objective of securing a foolproof system of international inspection and control. And we can never confuse negotiation with appeasement...