Word: melinda
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...MELINDA by Gaia Servadio. 375 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
This novel seems to have been sprayed out of a can. As with most of the new and convenient instant satires, Melinda is compounded of 2% active ingredient and 98% harmless propellant. Even so, it should not be inhaled over a prolonged period...
...only dead, there never was a birth announcement. The book is a catchy packaging job of the familiar semi-exaggerations about how the super-rich and super-famous flit mindlessly from pleasure to pleasure in ever-tightening circles that lead to self-destruction. With pagan innocence, Melinda herself commits incest, adultery, child neglect, international outrage and multiple murder. Because she is not a character, but the author's representation of nascent id, Melinda cannot suffer hell and damnation. She must be ticketed to limbo on a Russian moon rocket that gets irretrievably rutted in orbit around the earth. There...
...issue's most engaging writing is the description by "Melinda" of an old man talking a child out of a bag of jelly beans: "The old man was talking a blue streak all about just how bad and dangerous jelly beans could be, especially if you were a little kid and didn't quite know how to handle them...
...Washington. The following week, the Observer broke through with Eleanor's description of her last, baffling days in Beirut with Philby. He was disconsolate, she reported, over the death of his pet fox Jackie. The Times published the first pictures of Philby with his new Moscow wife, Melinda-a girl who likes spies apparently, since her former husband was Philby's colleague-in-espionage, Donald Maclean...