Word: smug
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What pleases the Western audiences, apart from the crisp gags, is the smug conviction that California has captured the great Neil Simon and thus is one up on New York. But it is not quite that simple. Simon has not succumbed to California; he has just borrowed it. He asks: "How can I be a turncoat when everything about me-all the baggage I've accumulated since my birth-is pure New York?" In Manhattan, Simon lived in a comfortable East Side townhouse. Now he has a massive electronic gate blocking the entrance to the ten-room house, gardens...
...solar and wind power. But it is aimed not at providing information on an alternative way of doing things, but at creating an alternative world. It represents a new 40-acres-and-a-mule mentality that avoids the problems in cities, education, and American life in general by taking smug refuge in dropping...
...even with prodigal use of those two favorite novelistic themes, drugs and sex, the book remains a heavy-handed and smug treatment of emotionless, sterile relationships and the depravity and violence they engender. The dead babies of the title (and Amis spells this out without much subtlety) are the love, understanding and compassion which the characters of the novel have destroyed with their omniverous desire for pleasurable sensations...
...back talk, a keen sense of irony and an indomitable lust for survival. Cartoon heroes, if you think about it, tend to be victims. Either that or insufferable, like Mickey Mouse. Only Bugs Bunny managed to triumph in his struggles against an assortment of splenetic aggressors without ever getting smug...
...more properly, these people are remaking the small-town life-style that American writers since Sinclair Lewis have been excoriating. Prudish and bigoted, they have everything their smug little hearts could desire - except the power to reproduce themselves (probably because they lack fresh air and real sunshine). They must send sirens up to lure studs down, and that is where the boy - despite his dog's warning - goes wrong, precipitating one of the year's better chase adventures...