Word: shapelessly
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...reality, of course, is that Doctorow is writing, telling prickly truths, getting a life down on the page. The result is totally shapeless, but it is also funny and full of juice. It is interesting to note that John Updike, in his Bech chronicles, Philip Roth, in his Zuckerman books, and now Doctorow have written some of their best recent work about the impossibility of writing. Writers, it seems certain, will outsurvive cockroaches, no matter what toxins they spray on themselves. -By John Skow
...actors form a flawless ensemble. Hurt, who bears the heaviest weight of words, and Walken, whose character has the softest edges, deserve particular praise. Director Mike Nichols has imposed a shaping dramatic tension on shapeless lives and on a play that is of necessity loosely structured. His uncanny sense of modern body language brilliantly matches Rabe's sensitivity to verbal gestures. Everyone involved in Hurlyburly (including all its designers) have stared hard, long and with compassionate intelligence into the face of contemporary banality, and found ways of transcending it without falsifying. Theirs is an important work, masterly accomplished...
...novel's title is the name of a shapeless pendant of marsh and sand that meets the Atlantic about midway between Charleston, S.C., and Savannah, Ga. Simons, pronounced Simmons ("I'm a rare one-m Simons"), lives in this area among the palmettos, scrub oaks, fiddler crabs, and slave descendants who speak Gullah and keep the faith at Marvin's R.O. Sweet Shop and Baby Grand. There, Simons says, "I am a celebrity because I'm white, not even teen-age yet, and possess the partial aura of the Duchess...
...Irish country side. Luckily for the reader. McGinley is to skillful to allow the incest itself to absorb the story. His matter-of-fact treatment of the details of their love and a well-crafted plot keep the story from being bogged down by free-floating sentiment or shapeless descriptions of characters. McGinley's polse, skill, detachment, and emotional thoroughness make this novel, remote through it is from American experience, an excellent story...
...rejected hard-and-fast distinctions between painting and poetry. He loved words. PHOTO, announces the writing on a 1925 canvas that, being mostly blank, is clearly not a photograph; and then, around a shapeless blob of blue pigment, the wiry script declares that "this is the color of my dreams." Yearning is fixed in a depicted absence. "In my pictures there are tiny forms in vast empty spaces," Miró once explained. "Empty space, empty horizons, empty planes, everything that is stripped has always impressed...