Word: surly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...uncomfortable-looking Marine-improbably disguised in a Cardin suit-stood guard at the door to Kissinger's bedroom. Early in the week, motorcycle-borne photographers had tracked the negotiators' limousines in a wild cross-country pursuit to their secret meeting place in the Paris exurb of Gif-sur-Yvette: a two-story, tile-roofed villa. A gallery of photographers and TV cameramen gathered on ladders, fence posts and nearby rooftops in hopes of finding out what was being said inside the villa...
...legal trouble-if the name happens to be one that French law finds distasteful. Last week every Frenchman with an infelicitous name seemed to be protesting the case of Gérard and Paulette Tro-gnon, a middle-class couple from the town of Le Mée-sur-Seine southeast of Paris. Recently a three-judge court in nearby Melun ruled that the Trognons could not bestow their name on their three-year-old foster son Philippe. The court did not object to the couple but only to their surname, which means stump or butt end. A name like...
...commercial Broadway plays that, as movies, remain stubbornly stagebound. Most of Lovers takes place inside the same apartment set, instilling a sense of in creasing confinement that stifles screen comedy. There are some good fleeting gags, but here too there is a sense of constriction. Simon writes jokes and sur faces, not characters, so the actors really have nowhere to go in developing their roles...
...trial at the Old Bailey turn himself into a swarm of malevolent bees. Soon after, the bees become a pack of ravening wolves and then, successively, a series of the earth's largest life forms: an elephant leading a protest march and a grove of giant sequoias sur rounding Buckingham Palace...
DELILLO'S NOVEL operates through deadpan-absurdist humor, and brute suspense. Names, conversations, non-sequitur events become progressively more other-worldly (sub-rather than sur-real) and the concatenations of bewildering vignettes are glued together only by the reader's curiosity. But all the while, DeLillo demonstrates his golden ear for the tin and tinsel of Americanese, and many of his dialogues skewer perfectly the soft spots in academic double-talk, adolescent vagueness, the jargon of nuclear warfare (as in Herman Kahn's own book of the dead. On Thermonuclear War), public relations yes-speak, and the excruciatingly serious military...