Word: wanly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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THIS NOVEL, MARGARET DRABble's 12th, concludes an ambitious project that the author began with The Radiant Way (1987) and continued in A Natural Curiosity (1989). Essentially, Drabble has been trying to counter the solipsistic bent of so much contemporary fiction, that wan parade of heroes and heroines talking to themselves -- usually about themselves -- and deaf to anything beyond the echoes of self-consciousness. Novels, particularly Victorian triple-deckers, once made room for the outside world, for the ways that history, politics, economics, etc., impinged on the lives of ordinary people. Are such narratives impossible now, or have most novelists...
...Middlesex Country. The ceiling lights have the grayish-white color of dirty institutional bed linen, and colors are sapped, dulled in this civil service twilight. The chalkboard looks olive drab, the cheap wall veneer blends into the dusty browns of the portraits. Even the well-tanned private lawyers look wan and pasty...
...debut in 1947 have only intensified the relevance of Streetcar's vision of sexual passion as a force so powerful that the principal characters must all lie to themselves about it. But if Streetcar emphatically belongs back on Broadway, it deserves far better than this starry but mostly wan and torpid production...
Three attractions -- one flop, two smashes -- are new to the world. The Visionarium film, shown on nine curved screens that wreathe the audience, is the least of the lot: a wan drama, with few aerial thrills, that puts Jules Verne (Michel Piccoli) into the time machine of his friend H.G. Wells (Jeremy Irons), with help from a friendly baggage handler (Gerard Depardieu). In the dungeon of Sleeping Beauty's Castle, a powder-puff piece of surreal estate inspired by Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, reposes a fabulous Audio- Animatronics dragon that snorts steam, flashes its stoplight eyes...
...message. "We're going to have to broaden the appeal," he conceded last week, while giving no evidence that he knew how. Nor is it clear that Tsongas can keep up effectively with Clinton's tireless pace. During a televised debate in Dallas last week, Clinton was feisty, Tsongas wan. "I was just exhausted," he said later. His lean campaign organization, which he began to enlarge only after New Hampshire, also has difficulty competing with the far larger team Clinton assembled last fall...