Word: wind-up
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ALEXANDER AND THE WIND-UP MOUSE, by Leo Lionni (Pantheon; $3.95). A toybox parable for an automated age tells how a real mouse named Alexander yearns to be like his wind-up friend Willie-until he learns that children are fickle and mechanical toys grow obsolete...
Washington gossips are wont to make unkind jokes about "Plastic Pat, the Wind-Up Doll." But Pat Nixon has paid them no heed. Pat, backed up by Daughters Tricia and Julie, made the rounds of wounded servicemen at Honolulu's Tripler General Hospital. She was completely relaxed with the G.I.s, who were as impressed with her as they were with Julie's interest and enthusiasm and Tricia's flowing golden tresses. The Nixon ladies then returned to Washington, but not for long. Pat leaves on a three-day trip to California and the Pacific Northwest this week...
...leaves its place under the bed and appears-lo!-as a soup tureen. Fortunate is the man who inherits a 1912 Corona typewriter or an Atwater-Kent radio in plywood Gothic style. They are also lucky who have-squirreled away somewhere-cast-iron toys, lead molds, bubble-gum machines, wind-up phonographs, toy steam engines, pieces of farm machinery, embossed advertisements-in fact, any of the detritus of industrialism. It is wanted...
...robust, hilarious scene, reminiscent of Richardson's Tom Jones, Cardigan (Trevor Howard) and his lady (Jill Bennett) rush to get undressed. She races ahead-then turns back to help him put of his girdle. And the charge itself is almost entirely successful. The rigid troops move forward like wind-up toy soldiers, under the hypnotic spell of unquestioned tradition. The firing begins; the hoofs and bodies and blood combine. Screams and guns seem to reach beyond the screen. The hysteria and terror are as palpable as dust; the slaughter is a testament to the inanity of blind obedience...
...only impossible to miss, but every thrust is likely to be fatal. To begin with, there is the dreary genre itself-a peek-into-the-future theme that titillates with dark allusions to the present. Then there are Drury's characters, a confusion of ideological wind-up toys carelessly slapped down to accommodate the easily distracted. There are the plots that are not plots but crisis situations on "which each character is obliged to comment, regardless of the triviality of his contribution. Above all, Drury writes the most impenetrable prose this side of a Japanese motorcycle manual rendered...