Word: waining
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...shire, and tended until her recent death by the softly malicious and completely delightful Angela Thirkell. Those writers intelligent enough to acknowledge Mrs. Thirkell's leadership (like Nevil Shute and 'Miss Read') have always enjoyed the quiet success their sound judgment deserved; those rebellious Angries (like John Braine, John Wain and that lot) who have ignored her example have inevitably become eminently unreadable. Their prose becomes barren, sluggish and didactic; their characters tedious; and their plots angular or absurd...
...TRAVELLING WOMAN, by John Wain (207 pp.; St. Martin...
Perhaps because he grew up in a drab manufacturing area near Manchester and once wrote about a young man making love to a doxy in an outhouse, Novelist John Wain, 34, has been tarred by British critics with the feathers of the Angry Young Men. Novelist Wain rejects the label-and with good reason. With this novel about marital infidelity as practiced by England's rootless middle class, he identifies himself with a school that looks back not in anger but in languor...
...Novelist Wain's assets are a sharp eye for the social fads and furbelows of suburban England, a sharp ear for the mannered vulgarities of middle-class speech. What the book lacks is either the pulse beat of anger or the tart shivers of satirical laughter...
Eager to Belong. The Angry Young Men are scarcely beat; yet British reserve merely muffles several striking similarities in theme and attitude. When Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim) virtually dismisses politics as a "mug's game," any hipster would reply "Yes, man, yes!" When one of John Wain's characters in Hurry on Down tries to avoid introducing his parents to a friend because he is ashamed of their working-class manner and appearance, there is more than an echo of Sunday Dinner in Brooklyn. When Colin Wilson proclaims that the Outsider "is the one man who knows...