Word: squalore
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...later Ted Tice feels the shopping center squalor of our own time, a motel room, space on a floor plan instead of a room. Hazzard reminds us of the typical misery of the city-world we live in: the "sleazy inevitability" of industrialized loneliness, among "the freakishness, fads, and obscure forms of endurance," the "ceaseless milling in anonymity and extreme loneliness, with little reverie and no peace," and the boredom of living in a world that is all a "costly shambles ruled by tax laws," where "existence has to be turned over to the experts...
Sporting an 0-1-1 Ivy record and a 3-3-1 mark in ECAC Division I play, the Crimson then caught a jet for the coast, there to absorb a few rays on the beach, survey the flora and fauna of the San Diego Zoo, barter in the squalor-surrounded markets of Tijuana...and lose three hockey games, very convincingly...
...other spy novel these might be fatal lapses. But Le Carre is not any other spy novelist. Throughout, he is aware not only of the moral squalor that can attend espionage - but also of Auden's ironic observation: "We are left alone with our day, and the tune is short and/ History to the defeated/ May say Alas but cannot help or pardon...
...songs, and here they are." There's a feebly executed but well-meaning attempt to create coffee-house atmosphere--the audience trades its ticket stubs during intermission for a cup of coffee and a croissant--but the floodlit cavernous Leverett dining hall offers little in the way of bohemian squalor or continental chic...
...perhaps the book's overall blandness is not Theroux's fault--maybe the geography is to blame. After all, squalor in Mexico is pretty similar to squalor in Peru. South America lacks the historical associations of Europe and the exotic attractions of Asia. Maybe Theroux's topic is not interesting...