Word: weighted
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that in The Betsy too, and it made the damned thing worth seeing. Pale, parched, and very thin, with a mop of white hair, a fluffy white moustache, and a high, whiny, sing-song jewish voice, Olivier moves through the movie like a haunted little ham, carrying the weight of the Holocaust on his feeble shoulders. The character pushes himself--the way Olivier must have pushed himself to do this role while in and out of the hospital for heart surgery--and suddenly he'll erupt with a screech so charged that this comatose movie wakes up and shakes itself...
Alter is best at creating an atmosphere for the seemingly epiphanal moments in the book. The only difficulty is that these moments, when they finally occur, do not always fulfill the promise of their set-ups. For example, a fat man determines to lose a lot of weight, once and for all, and let his slothful habits fall by the wayside. The description of his decision and the absurd steps he takes are fine, but after he gets all cranked up, he simply and predictably caves in again. These trivial moments of neo-existential despair wear kind of thin. Alter...
...when Margaret, Isabel's old housekeeper, reappears towards the end, the writing tightens up again. Margaret practically embodies that stubborn, un-American subculture, which the author seems to identify with Catholicism. Even if Final Payments lacks a clear message and Mary Gordon's language often crumples under the weight of her cliches, at least one gets the sense of a writer searching for her own voice...
...gargantuan stomach as lovingly as a child might fondle a stuffed Teddy bear. He raises his bushy eyebrows so high that one expects them to graze the ceiling. He turns the mere act of getting up from lunch into a dainty comic ballet. Ordered by his doctor to lose weight-half his weight-Morley adamantly refuses. "I have eaten my way to the top," he announces in his most imperious manner. "I am a work of art created by the finest chefs in Europe." Robert Morley is indeed a work of art. How nice to find him back...
...Papple Jr. recounts the brief reign of Pope John Paul John Paul I, who died 19 minutes after the coronation ceremony in which he took the names of three predecessors. Elsewhere on the page is a photo of the Queensboro Bridge falling into the East River under the weight of 10,000 marathon runners. Another story, under the headline FALL SEASON THROWN INTO CONFUSION BY STUDIO 54 BLAZE; ISRAELI REACTION MUTED, tells how the disco burned to the ground after Owner Steve Rubell refused to admit the firemen because they were not chic enough...