Word: wilson
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Middle Age of Mrs. Eliot, by Angus Wilson. A portrait of a muddled Widow Britannia by a first-rate caricaturist...
...feel in my hip pocket." The lady had a voice "that dragged itself out of her throat like a sick man getting out of bed." Dinner "tasted like a discarded mailbag." Since Detective Marlowe was acceptable to brows of every altitude, including snobbish Critic Edmund (Axel's Castle) Wilson, even parboiled eggheads could carry Chandler's thrillers under their arms without resorting to plain wrappers...
...Author Wilson's heroine is a smart, smug, vastly muddled and grimly girdled figure of middle-class bafflement. Meg Eliot is widowed in a fit of absentmindedness : her husband, a prosperous lawyer, is shot by a confused Asian student, who is really gunning for the Minister of Education of an Indonesian state. "If that had happened when we were young, there would have been a war about it," one character remarks. But there is no war, not even compensation for the widow. Instead, Meg faces only a set of sad second choices-social work, the society of Angry Young...
...takes dingy rooms in Kensington, enrolls in a secretarial school. She tangles with her brother, a brilliant, sexually confused war wreck, who has turned from the complexities of civilized life to the simplicities of horticulture. Author Wilson puts his widow in the temporary toils of an Angry Young Man, the pointy-bearded but pointless son of her best friend. In a savage little vignette Wilson makes clear that the fellow is angry not because he is young, but because he is not really...
...Author Wilson keeps nudging the reader into the conviction that there has been a death somewhere in the British family; Wilson is obviously still trying to identify the corpse and sort out the suspects. Despite this essentially sad preoccupation, he is pure comedian with a mimic's malice, a gent's outfitter's eye for the socially off-base, and an eavesdropper's avidity for the give-away phrase. Wilson is a first-rate caricaturist whose stature increases as he diminishes others...