Word: swinish
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Clare (Jacqueline Bisset), a onetime sitcom queen keen for a comeback, has buried her swinish husband Sidney (Paul Mazursky), who materializes and pledges his infernal love to her. Clare's neighbor, Lisabeth (Mary Woronov), has just moved in with her daughter Zandra (Rebecca Schaeffer) because the exterminators are at her house, removing every trace of her ex-husband. Now these women and two others must fend off, or hop on, a platoon of randy males: Lisabeth's wormy ex (Wallace Shawn); her playwright brother (Ed Begley Jr.); her invalid prodigy son (Barrett Oliver); and two manservants, sleazy, pansexual Frank...
...anything distinguished the Memphis closing from a cortege of other newspaper deaths in Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Sarasota, Fla., Tampa, Washington and, provided a buyer is not found soon, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, it was the Press-Scimitar's swinish attitude toward reporters from outside. The Press-Scimitar would shove a camera in the face of a dying leukemia victim, yet when it came time for itself to perish, Editor Milton R. Britten wrote in a memo, "I don't want anybody with pompadours and gleaming teeth in our newsroom with Minicams on the last...
...pick up the pace. Worse, Mailer shuns the devices that can make long pieces of fiction irresistible. Suspense is banished: everything has already happened in Ancient Evenings, not only historically, but also in the lives of its people. Nothing is surprising, except perhaps how polymorphously perverse and consistently swinish the ancients were, according to their newest historian...
...Squeers' swinish daughter Fanny, a lilt-ingfemmefatale in the Crummies' troupe, a bitter near-deaf crone called Peg. By sulking or shrugging or exacting fatal revenge, she spins three sprightly variations on the theme. Nicholas' sturdiest friend and Kate's most dastardly seducer are both played by the same actor: Bob Peck has a biathlon field day exhibiting the far poles of man's temperaments. Even John Woodvine, a bleak house of malevolence as old Ralph Nickleby, gets to sing as the star of a comic opera skit...
Among its many other functions, fiction brings back news from the front lines of the war between the sexes. In recent years, such bulletins have made for increasingly grim reading: the men are swinish, the women strident, and most of the fun has gone out of the struggle. The 13 stories in The Lone Pilgrim thus offer what amounts to a minority report. Author Laurie Colwin is a remarkably cheerful messenger. She tells of women and men who somehow manage to live vibrantly through the problems they cannot solve and the fights they cannot...