Word: sad
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...really gunning for the Minister of Education of an Indonesian state. "If that had happened when we were young, there would have been a war about it," one character remarks. But there is no war, not even compensation for the widow. Instead, Meg faces only a set of sad second choices-social work, the society of Angry Young Men, bohemian sex. While Author Wilson unfolds a kind of serial on the theme of "Which Weeds Will the Widow Wear?" he also presents a series of sharp, lantern-slide portraits of modern England...
Author Wilson keeps nudging the reader into the conviction that there has been a death somewhere in the British family; Wilson is obviously still trying to identify the corpse and sort out the suspects. Despite this essentially sad preoccupation, he is pure comedian with a mimic's malice, a gent's outfitter's eye for the socially off-base, and an eavesdropper's avidity for the give-away phrase. Wilson is a first-rate caricaturist whose stature increases as he diminishes others...
...begun in Justine (TIME, Aug. 26, 1957) and Balthazar (TIME, Aug. 25, 1958). Most of the same characters are still loping through the bedrooms and back alleys of Alexandria: Pursewarden, the slightly mad novelist-diplomat; Justine, the dark-browed, amoral Jewess; Nessim, her millionaire Coptic Christian husband; Darley, the sad-sack Irish schoolteacher; Melissa, the tuberculous Greek dancer. But the protagonist of this new book is a relative newcomer, David Mountolive, who returns to Egypt as British ambassador after having lived there in his youth...
...last they seem as important and ominous as any character in the book. When the bomb finally goes off, it is not so much an exclamation point as a period to a narrative that has told all but judged nothing. Who is to say that the half-mad sad-sack hero really is different from the nihilist leader, or that the civil servant's allegiance is so far removed from the revolutionary's? Author Biely makes the reader work toward the answers...
...shared his table dropped a bone to applaud, her diamonds glittering; she seemed bemused by what a night of Sinatra might be worth. Whatever the song -Willow Weep for Me, I've Got You Under My Skin, The Lady Is a Tramp-Frankie's unmatched showmanship, his sad, slow baritone, his baggy, bedroom eyes got the message across...