Word: virginia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Down in Darkness, by William Styron. Decay and aimlessness in country-club Virginia; a first novel by a 26-year-old Southerner who writes well if not refreshingly (TIME, Sept...
...Virginia is a lonely widow with a melony figure and a melon for a head. She is old enough to be Sandrino's mother, and for a while she acts the part. Mornings, she shoos him off to his haberdasher job. Noons, she carts him his lunch topped with his favorite dessert, persimmons. When the weather turns nippy, she digs into her skimpy bank balance and buys him a coat. Then one day her jealous joshing about some unknown girl across the street gives Sandrino his cue-the poor woman is hopelessly in love with...
After that, the swaggering little punk degrades Virginia, pushes her from bed to worse. He beats her brutally over trifles, sponges off her ("I'll take everything you've got"), blackmails a woman friend who tries to help...
Over all of Sandrino's twisted personal behavior hovers a political fantasy: that Fascism will make a comeback in Italy. To hurry X-day along, he signs over Virginia's remaining lire to some underworld sharpies. For a receipt they give him a bit of black cloth, purportedly from Mussolini's death shirt, soon leave him holding...
Sandrino has one eye on revenge and the other on the girl across the street when Virginia suddenly announces that she is pregnant. In a grisly finale, Sandrino impales her head on a pike fence till it becomes a slippery, lifeless pulp...