Word: satirists
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HAVING documented life in Newark and New York, in the process establishing himself as a superb social satirist (though, admittedly, the satire of late has been diluted by too much detail and conversation), Roth has now written his first exclusively introspective novel. Having reached the age of 25, he begins to muck about in the depths where he was once content to capture the ironies on the surface. To some extent, the process began in the character of Letting Go's Paul Herz, but where Roth's study of Herz was pedestrian, weighted with many of the conventions of novelistic...
Elaine May is a corrosively perceptive satirist with a mean comic punch. Her off-Broadway one-acter Adaptation, the first of a double bill completed by Terrence McNally's Next, makes one laugh till it hurts, partly because the ache of recognition is in every line and situation. She has the wit to see that if Pavlov's dogs salivated at the tinkle of bells signifying food, modern man is not so very different. He salivates at psychological flash cards marked Emotional Maturity, Identity Crisis, Making a Commitment, as well as at traditional cues for action such...
Scatology as a tool. Although the literary qualities of Portnoy's Complaint are uniquely Roth's, the monologue technique is pure show biz. The similarities between Portnoy's delivery and that of the late Satirist Lenny Bruce are readily apparent. While Bruce used scatology in his nightclub performances as a tool, primarily to uncover social hypocrisies, his savage humor also gained its neurotic style from conflicts about appearance and reality. For example, Bruce was constantly asking why portrayals of people doing something as beautiful and useful as making love were considered obscene while portrayals of murder...
ALEXANDER POPE, by Peter Quennell. A considered, selective and urbane biography of the great 18th century poet, satirist and curmudgeon...
...aristocrat and a practicing attorney, makes novel writing sound only slightly more difficult than drawing a will. He acknowledges the existence of problems and flounderings, but they all seem to succumb to his analytic brain. In addition, he appears to know just where he stands: "I am neither a satirist nor a cheerleader," he says with cool assurance. "I am strictly an observer." An honorable position honestly stated, it should quiet those critics who want an Auchincloss novel to be more than a well-crafted, highly polished portrait of the world he knows...