Word: wasteland
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...discriminate between John Considine's hail-fellow-well-met furniture dealer and Carradine's petulant artiste. With one noteworthy exception, each of the ten central figures goes in search of a human connection, and each comes up empty-handed (if only in the figurative sense). Move over Teenage Wasteland, the film says, and make way for an equally parched desert peopled with men and women who are a bit older but no less confused and frustrated than the Who's quadrophenic...
...accidents. Clem and Lena have a cloudy sense of what hit them. They are well-versed in their own weaknesses, but not on the whys and hows of their lives. A rare visitor to their room registers an outside opinion on what the two have accomplished: "In the wasteland he saw a curious mixture of loyalty and stupidity...
Following this auspicious beginning, Ms. Fraser's letter degenerates into a wasteland of cliche and propaganda. Spewing out such terms as "class conscious protest," the "Imperialist puppet regime," and "the Stalinist deformed workers state," the author fights to disguise her letter's basic implausibility. Reading like a typical showpiece for any sort of disreputable organization, the letter struggles for legitimacy by using technical jargon and meaningless prose. Appropriately enough, the letter closes with further allusions to "imperialist spies," "imperialist research," and "imperialist butchery...
...YORK: Charlie's Anguish. The couple inched painfully from Fordham Road into a wasteland of The Bronx. Clinging to each other for support, the old man and woman mounted a curb and struggled for a moment while she regained her balance. Then, slowly, they went on. Watching them shuffle into the shadows of late afternoon, Detective Donald Gaffney sighed heavily and said, "There goes prime meat...
...characters often are lost like this somewhere in the heart of the city. In fact, stumbling through England's dark, damp, declining metropolis becomes for Theroux like reading that dark, damp, declining novelistic form of sharp turns and blind alleys, the thriller. As in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, to which The Family Arsenal seems to invite comparison, the characters emerge at first as anonymous voices: a crook prowling a seedy riverside district; an accountant who refuses to yield his house to a rapidly deteriorating neighborhood, an aristocratic woman who collects people like souvenirs. But, as the characters are unmasked...