Word: sad
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Colored folks in the sad and seedy rooming houses around Talman Avenue and West Washington Boulevard on Chicago's West Side had long since decided what to do about Ernest Craig: call the cops. Craig, a tall 28-year-old Negro with a thin mustache, a hard eye and a wild laugh, was a bad man to mess around with. He kept a collection of pistols in the two rooms he occupied in a run-down corner house and he was always firing them off or leaning out the windows and pointing them at people...
Take a Sunny Morning. The eyes that finally see through Max to his sad and waif-like soul are the sleepy eyes of Mrs. Morgan's 18-year-old son Jimmy. An epileptic and a problem child who refuses to believe anything his tutors tell him about basic trends or the continuity of Western culture, Jimmy wears his mother down until she opens the nursery door, lets him go along with Divver on a trip to the Polish Corridor in the summer...
...This sad and ridiculous situation is the starting point of William Sansom's smoothly joined and brightly told study of middle-aged delusional jealousy. Henry Bishop yearned for the days when people gently chased butterflies with nets; by contrast, he found modern life crude and vulgar. Until Diver's appearance, his 20 years of marriage with Madge had been plain, placid and passionless. Diver was all energy and heartiness. To Madge's amusement, he thrust trick gadgets at Henry-a golden dog whose eyes lit up, a dinner plate that leaped up convulsively...
Omaha, a city with a "welcome stranger" past, has been good to displaced persons. When a slight, sad-eyed Yugoslav named Eugene Stefan got there this summer with his grown-up daughter Heddy, he felt that he had found a haven at last. World War II had made him a wanderer; his wife had died of hardship, his mother had died in a concentration camp and his sister had disappeared. Afterward, Tito's government had refused him the right to go home to Yugoslavia...
Author Balchin seems to find it sad that such an enterprising young man should have been thwarted in his precocious effort to create a unified Italy. Most readers, while enjoying the suavity of the Balchin tour de force, will still feel that Cesare was a lot blacker than Author Balchin's whitewash suggests...