Word: tautly
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...turmoil: Houghton's Brick, who is Big Daddy's son and Maggie's husband, drowns himself in alcohol and gradually becomes alive as he is forced to explain why he has turned away from the world and steeped himself in his own self-disgust. Houghton endows Brick with a taut passivity; his physical outlashes stun us with their uncontrollable violence, revealing his character's inability to accept his guilt about his feelings of love for his dead friend Skipper. Cox's Maggie exploits Brick's passivity and seeming impotence as she desperately tries to reawaken his love...
This revelation, added to postwar years of teaching, produced Lord of the Flies (1954), a taut parable about a group of English schoolboys who are deposited for safekeeping on a coral island while their elders wage nuclear war. Slowly but inexorably, they revert to savagery. "The theme," Golding explained, "is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature." The book sold modestly in both England and the U.S. (2,383 copies), but a paperback reprint issued in 1959 hit pay dirt. It became the desired and then the required reading for millions...
...being suggested as therapy for such noncardiovascular diseases as certain types of diabetes (the body's cells make better use of insulin) and asthma. For some people, heavy exercise like weight training seems to slow down the effects of aging, keeping the skin youthful and muscles taut...
DIED. Ross Macdonald, 67, writer of taut, psychologically acute detective novels; of Alzheimer's disease, which he had had for three years; in Santa Barbara, Calif. In such books as The Moving Target, The Gallon Case and The Chill, his sleuth Lew Archer roamed Southern California through false fronts and cracked surfaces to unearth his clients' dark familial sins and secrets that almost always led to murder. Born Kenneth Millar, he adopted his pseudonym after his wife Margaret became a successful mystery novelist. Though his early work echoed Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, his only peers among modern...
...others to enter. After she takes in the bum, Aston's altruism causes her to suffer painful flashbacks of her past in a mental hospital and to recall her inability to deal with people. Shipley creates a very neurotic and tense Aston who has tremendous difficulty finishing thoughts. Her taut facial expressions constantly match her nervous and fidgety personality. Shipley has many opportunities to reveal her feelings to the audience, most notably in a long monologue when she describes her experiences in the mental hospital with electric shock treatments. She is able to effectively display her character's anger...