Word: sarsaparilla
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...problems at Manhattan's New School for Social Research. Her interest in the plight of the cities was almost as touching as her determination to sit at the feet of the New School's newest lecturer, Conservative Spokesman William F. Buckley Jr., 42. Though urbanity flowed like sarsaparilla, Buckley never did get around to talking about the cities in his first class. Instead, he led his enraptured students through a 90-minute recitative of conservative epigrams, to wit: "The main function of the state-perhaps the only one-is the maintenance of a stable currency...
...character who loses all his marbles but one is Arthur Brown, a shambling, boneless, orange-haired simpleton who works for 50 years as a grocer's boy in Sarsaparilla (a coyly satirical name for the Sydney district of Parramatta). Arthur is seen by his neighbors at the end of Terminus Road as a "dill," a "no-hoper," a "loopy," a "nut," a "mophret" (hermaphrodite), and "a dirty old man." The reader sympathizes with these brisk Aussie judgments; Arthur is indeed hard to follow as he mumbles about the place goggling at the dreary scenery or polishing that glass marble...
What to make of these terrible twins -"those two poofteroos," as the contemptuous inhabitants of Sarsaparilla see them? At first sight, it would seem that the old Confederate camp had moved to a last site in the real Deep South-Down Under; that the old Spanish-mosstroopers of Southern decadence ride again in New South Wales. White's celebrated style, in its sidelong, suggestive, subjunctive way, might nudge a reader to the conclusion that this is like early Capote or Tennessee Williams. And, somehow, White has contrived to convert a scrubby Australian suburb into standard Old South gothic. Moldering...
...finally is content with nothing less than to present some enactment of the central mysteries of Christianity. Arthur is "hermaphroditic Adam," father-and mother-of mankind, also divine child, also martyred divinity. In these terms, Mandala becomes not a dense literary puzzle but an obscenity. Arthur, the shaman of Sarsaparilla, is too monstrous to think upon: quack religion and genuine psychopathology are mixed up. White has written a mystery play in drag...
Whatever it means, White's chariot swings low over a scruffy imaginary suburb of Sydney called Sarsaparilla. There the reader discovers five moderately interesting people who, after 440 pages of intricately imagistic prose, suddenly turn out to be the principals in a real-life Passion play that finds its climax in an actual crucifixion. The suggestion is that life is the perennial Passion of a recurrent Christ...