Word: stacton
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...BONAPARTES by David Stacton. 382 pages. Simon & Schuster...
...most entertaining. Evidence of that sequins every page in this almost too insistently scintillating biography of the Bonaparte family. David Stacton, a well-known historical novelist (Sir William, People of the Book), employs his flair for research and penchant for the trenchant style to present the Napoleonic drama as an immense and mordant Molieresque comedy in which the Bonapartes personify le bourgeois grotesquely attempting to become a gentilhomme...
...principal characters, as Stacton presents them...
Paste Jewels. Stacton embellishes this attractive plan with his vivid sense of scene and detail. He freights it with learning and lively language. He floods it with his unique virtues-and the book drowns. Gustavus and Oxenstierna are the most real figures, but they are not really seen in action but in a series of stills, like a set of heroic paintings-"The Last Meeting," "Meditation in the Garden," "The King Falls in Battle." Lars and his sister are truly pitiable, but they are surrounded by grotesques, and at the end are dispatched with the terrible coldness of boredom...
Throughout, Stacton sacrifices story for gnomic utterance. He is often witty and pithy, as when he throws knives at such favorite targets as Richelieu (and De Gaulle): "Perfumes are best used to cover up the stinks of cunning. La Gloire de France is a perfume." He is sometimes eccentrically decorative, as when he fondles a favorite word (panache, chryselephantine) or interpolates an essay on ancient music or a sermon on international law. However entertaining, the devices are finally irrelevant and intrusive. Their cumulative effect is as pointless as a sword swallower who decides to eat the hilt first because...