Word: wasp
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...mobility, he has risen from his birthplace on Mulberry Street in Manhattan's Little Italy to become Hud's unwelcome neighbor. Gaetano's goodly impulse is to detox Hud: "You don't have to die." But Hud sees it as an intrusion of Wop on Wasp. He hurls endless ethnic slurs at Gaetano. To salvage Hud, Gaetano takes these insults with infinite good grace and gets enough snappers back to make the evening something of a celebrity roast. In the slugfest finale of Act I, Gaetano swings both parts of a refrigerator door at Hud, knocks...
Bech Is Back concerns an obverse, almost perverse antiself. Henry Bech is Jewish; John Updike is Wasp. Bech suffers from a 13-year-old writer's block. Updike averages a book a year. Bech is an unathletic urbanite. Updike is an enthusiastic sportsman and a countryman. Once these disparities have been marked, the author is free to play with words, with personae, even with whole nations...
...thought the notion of New York as Fun City died with the Lindsay administration? No such thing. In A Little Sex, Manhattan is still where a coupla crazy kids can get their Wasp jollies while jogging through Central Park, skateboarding past the Chrysler Building and making love in an apartment the size of the Metropolitan Museum's Egyptian wing. He (Tim Matheson) is a young Mad Ave. careerist. She (Kate Capshaw, whose resemblance to both Julie Christie and Diane Keaton makes her odds-on favorite as Warren Beatty's next costar) teaches at a girls' private school...
...tends to at this time of year, turned to politics...") Davis has a terrific feel for the mechanics of social rituals and hierarchies, and the best of Hometown uncovers a city only an insider could know. He tells of a widely believed rumor linking the handsome, popular WASP mayor to the socially prominent wife of a close Jewish friend; the "social marketplace" of Hamilton, a beauty shop frequented by women of diverse backgrounds; and, finally in the book's dramatic conclusion, the trial of a popular music teacher for masturbating in a department store bathroom...
...Dining Room might be subtitled The Decline of the Wasp, except that it is clear-eyed, touching and buoyantly funny. The stage set itself is something of an anachronism with its Sheraton table, Hepplewhite chairs and dour ancestral portraits. The time span is from the Depression to the present. The dining room used to be the site of unalterable tribal rites-Thanksgiving, Christmas, family fiscal confabulations. Now people eat in the kitchen...