Word: vividness
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...nothing much of a face. Yet the makeup, at first glance, was by no means unstriking. For half the evening, indeed-while its melodrama seemed crouching to spring-He had a jittery tension, a rataplan rhythm, a glare of circus lights and blare of circus music, that were theatrically vivid. Then things got fuzzy and highflown, and the melodrama lost its edge, the atmosphere lost its eeriness. The minor characters became tiresome, and the main character turned operatic...
...Pennsylvania Avenue side of the White House, the big round pansy bed was in vivid bloom, and the oriental magnolia trees were suddenly heavy with purple-edged white blossoms. The wide, deep lawn was a bright green. To the passer-by the Executive Mansion seemed whiter, dressier, gayer than at any time since five springs...
...through the narrator's contrasted affairs with two women, the U.S. middle class and the U.S. proletariat. The bourgeois wife, Imogen, is a convincing redigestion, in contemporary terms, of the kind of paralytic romanticism which Flaubert raged at (and suffered from). The proletarian taxi-dancer, Anna, is more vivid and engaging, and the glimpses into her world-a world of incidents like the Polish boarder's "doing his business and wrapping it up in paper" for Anna to pick up-are the most detached that any writer, left or right, has yet furnished on behalf...
...ultrasophisticated posture; hence the posture; sometimes looks a little self-deceived. But such civilized writing and observation are rare in the U.S. nowadays, and on its merits Memoirs of Hecate County is pretty certainly the best contemporary chronicle, so far, of its place and period. Evil is as vivid through the book as a bushful of snakes...
...With all due respect to our American cousins, whose language is vivid and amusing and has a superficial resemblance to our own, it is they who are partly responsible for this deplorable state...