Word: vapidly
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...Portland, Ottoline spent most of her adult life playing the role of patroness of the arts. Her mother and brothers tried hard when she was young to force her to conform to the conventional role of an upper-class woman of Edwardian England, to become the kind of vapid woman that, as Ottoline said later, "gossiped all the morning, then drove out to lunch with the shooters in tweeds, had tea in pink tea-gowns from Paris, and dined in still more gorgeous brocades and velvets." Throughout her life, Lady Morrell sought intensity--through mysticism in her youth...
Surrounding the hero and heroine, however, is a world full of characters more willing than they to bow to the rigid dictates of regency fashion. Elderly female relatives are constantly shocked at the heroine's outspokenness, and make liberal use of handkerchiefs, tears, and smelling salts. Vapid young men simper about in absurd clothes, worrying only about the make of their Hessians and the height of their collars. Brainless beauties fall desperately in love with ineligible fortune hunters and threaten to elope across the border to Scotland in the face of their family's disapproval. These other, less competent characters...
DECADENCE IS A VAPID and appallingly amoral book in more ways than all this indicates. Hougan, a contributing editor of Harper's, seems to suffer from a malady from which precious few journalists escape--a desire to retire to an isolated cabin somewhere and put it all together. In the effort, he's thrown together an indiscriminate, undirected mix of modern philosophy, fiction and social theory, and fitted it to everything on the American scene. There is hardly a cliche of any sort about recent America that's missing, be it drugs, the New Army, rock music, assassinations, or Nixon...
This sort of vapid speech demands to be performed as parody. Yet Guckenheimer has not delineated the humorous moments from the serious ones. The characters flounder in search of a voice; some scenes lack dramatic viewpoint to the verge of soap-opera tedium...
Word Dance, the first bit, is slow and haphazard. The characters dance and freeze, and then one delivers a pungent one-liner. The jokes are not terribly funny (where did you get those big brown eyes and that tiny mind?) but pointless facial expression and vapid delivery don't help them...