Word: squalore
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...Mister Johnson is considerably more than the portrait of a picaresque primitive. In a short novel, Cary has managed to convey the squalor of African village existence, the frustrations of English officials and the enormous volatility and friendliness of the Nigerian native. Novelist Cary, unlike most of his fellow practitioners, always seems to write as if he enjoyed it. In Mister Johnson his pleasure edges every sentence...
Rumpled Beds. For his teacher's fashionable Chelsea haunts, young Sickert substituted a series of battered studio digs in north and central London. There he sketched and painted scenes of British low life with a gusto and an eye for beauty in squalor that rivaled Degas and Lautrec. Like Lautrec, he doted on the dramatic lighting and rowdy shenanigans of turn-of-the-century music halls. He also liked to paint outdoors...
...World moves fast, beats with excitement. Veteran Crime Novelist W. R. Burnett (Little Caesar; High Sierra) knows the underworld jungle and has a keen ear for its talk. In his study of Arky's misplaced loyalty, he even tries to find some human motive behind the squalor of his story. In the search, he overdoes the idea that most of Arky's hoodlum ways can be explained by a poverty-stricken boyhood. Otherwise, the book is almost as unsentimental as Frank Costello on television...
Actually, The World's Last Corner is a picaresque novel with the juice squeezed out. The traditional picaresque offers a rogue-hero merrily breaking social conventions to rise from squalor to respectability; Plieviers hero, Wenzel, is more victim than rogue - a seafaring, 20th Century Everyman who breaks the laws of society only because he wants...
...husband, young Ericson cannot face responsibility any more than he could as a soldier. Teresa arrives hopefully, finds herself cooped up in squalor with a bitter mother-in-law, and tied to a boy who, unable to keep a job or strike out on his own, is soon reduced again to psychoneurotic panic...