Word: stale
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EVERY CRITIC has a position on Updike's style. It is "stale garlic" to Norman Mailer, "angel tongued" to most newspaper reviewers, "sometimes excessive" to Time magazine. Perhaps Updike's prose is overwrought and given to excess, to showing off. But it is in their excesses, as Updike once said of J. D. Salinger, that "artists become adventurers for us all." And it is, at least upon most occasions, an excess of love...
...celebrates Janet's "nude unity of so many shades of cream and pink and lilac." But too often he mixes four-letter words with what Norman Mailer once called the "stale garlic" of his lyricism (the offense being not in the four-letter words but in the garlic). Occasionally, the garlic stands alone, as in Updike's description of a man and woman achieving climax: "So he did then travel through a palace of cloth and sliding stairways throughout the casket of perfume that
...speeches, delivered with a new urbanity and self-effacing if slightly forced humor, before sizable crowds. For unlike Romney, Nixon is almost too well known. After eight years with Eisenhower, his loss to Kennedy, and his disastrous defeat by Pat Brown in California, he knows he must avoid seeming stale-and a loser-in the voters' minds...
...respect for his dogged and humble concern to tell a plain tale and to explain himself, rather than demonstrate the wickedness or folly of others. Nor is Kerouac capable of the brutal vulgarity of a writer such as James Jones, whose books strike anyone of any sensitivity as weary, stale, flat-and profitable...
...Rolleiflex cameras. To the dismay of the 48-year-old family firm of Rollei-Werke, Franke & Heidecke, the cameras have proved the more perishable of the two. Although Rollei's famed twin-lens reflex practically revolutionized photography when it was introduced in 1929, business began to go stale in the late '50s when its patents ran out, cheap imitations rolled in, and Rollei was caught without new developments...