Word: slapsticking
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...rich, Philip Roth continues to be misunderstood, or understood too quickly. There are causes for confusion: the contrast between the high-minded explainer of literary culture and the unbuttoned comedian who writes America's most raucously funny novels; the zigzagging from realism to fantasy, political satire to slapstick; and the dual image of the Connecticut country gentleman and the writing drudge whose spiritual home is Kafka's Prague...
...Feud as a tale is hardly distinguished. Berger's telling is. His language, rich in prewar idiom, is precise and laconic, the perfect foil to his slapstick plot. At first encounter, the characters appear to have been made of pig bladders, but the deeper their predicaments, the more convincing they become. The romance between Bernice and Ernie, a Hornbeck layabout, has the ring of lowlife truth. Says a sincere Ernie after a night of backseat love and a bottle of Rock 'n' Rye: "I'm sure trying to figure out a way to tell you what...
While Burgess at times lampoons Freud as much as everyone else in the story, he lauds the psychoanalyst's desire to see through the sanitized exterior of his culture to the real nature of man. The slapstick format, occasionally as predictable as the medium it parodies, spares us from excessive psychobabble, presenting instead humanity as it is, not as we would like to perceive it--with the author unmistakably siding with the former...
...TRANSITIONS from story to story make no pretense of being other than jarring, and the slapstick grows redundant at times, whether in self-parody or not. As the stories go on for a combined 400 pages, the devices that serve a half-hour TV show become, at times, painful. In contrast to television, which is fanatically purged of everything outside the common denominator. Burgess is resolutely idiosyncratic...
Such a study would surely want to examine the slapstick events that occurred last winter next door in Colbert County. After seven referendums in 25 years, Colbert County (pop. 54,519) voted itself wet, 10,576 to 9,411, while Lauderdale County (pop. 80,546) watched in disbelief. The first liquor store opened in the municipality of Tuscumbia. On a single day, it handled 6,500 transactions. In its first week, it took in $152,000. Cars with Lauderdale plates filled the square. Three policemen worked the traffic jams, and the lines were so long only ten people...