Word: sadnesses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...novella, characters turn on a radio or record player and listen to country and western music: Crystal Gayle, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson. Author Andre Dubus, 47, makes this C & W name dropping seem more than a bid for easy topicality. He writes about people whose lives evoke sad songs and wailing pedal steel guitars. They work at checkout counters, wait on tables, tend bar or fry hamburgers at fast-food outlets. All are somehow stranded, searching for a pattern to their existence beyond the wet circles left behind by their beer cans or cocktail glasses...
...always been lush galvanizers who surrender voluptuously to the jagged contours of melodrama. The viewer surrenders, just as willingly, to Trissenaar, a Diane Keaton-type, but with brains and guts and class; to Schygulla, with her wicked-witch profile and wicked, witty mouth; and to Sukowa, who, as sweet sad Mieze, blazes trails of girlish naiveté into the jungle of male psychopathy...
...black pegged pants and leather jackets, or else polka-dot crinoline skirts, and they group around tape-deck machines and dance to rock 'n' roll: boys with boys, girls with girls. In Japan it is always the group, even in rebellion. The spectacle is strangely sweet and sad...
...parched countries face the same sad pattern. Along the "Street of Sickness" in northern Brazil's sweltering market town of Irauçuba, a family of twelve huddles in a two-room shack, hoping to survive on the $22 a month it receives from the government. The reason: with no vegetation to eat, cattle have collapsed on their feet, or simply died. Some villagers in India are reduced to chewing grass, sucking the roots of herbs and scrambling alongside animals to lap up water that spills out of pumps. In drought-plagued areas of the Philippines that have seen...
Murphy's palette holds softer shades too. One character, known as Solomon, is every happy-sad old man you ever edged away from on the bus; he spars gingerly with an old pal, croaks a song or two and returns without warning to the attic of reverie. Look behind the electrified hair and the cunningly garbled consonants of Murphy's Buckwheat, a resurrection of the character from the Our Gang comedies, and you will find a showbiz paradigm: the exploitation of a smile and a conspicuous lack of talent into big bucks. Whites are not immune either...