Word: buttonless
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Cards of Identity. Author Cheever's plots carry his punch in the way that cotton carries chloroform. His stories are saturated with the sights and sounds of suburban life. His characters show the identity cards of the hard-pressed middle class: unpaid bills, buttonless shirts, little scraps of paper that read, "oleomargarine, frozen spinach, Kleenex, dog biscuit . . ." They believe they are "outside the realm of God's infinite mercy," and yet their prayer is heartfelt: "Preserve me from word games and adulterers, from basset hounds and swimming pools and frozen canapes and Bloody Marys...
...often a really funny line. By bringing to Pennsylvania a sophisticated young New Yorker (with a farm to sell) and his acidly vivacious girl friend, Plain and Fancy achieves some entertaining contrasts between plain and fancy living, country and city ways. When the Amish aren't donning their buttonless clothes, "shunning" a miscreant or putting up a barn, the city gal is being ogled by six frighteningly silent Amish youths, or is trying to pump water, churn butter, cook rice and grind sausage all at once-which makes the gayest five minutes in the show...
Instead of the frayed and buttonless clothes which he wears around the home palace grounds to save money, the miserly Nizam wore a well-pressed and spotless outfit-yellow turban, tweed coat, loose white trousers and black shoes. He peeled $1,000 off his own bundle (at least $200 million), laid in a supply of tea, cakes, nuts, ice cream, tomato juice and lemon squash, and gave an elegant garden party for New Delhi's 400, among them junketing Eleanor Roosevelt and India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The Nizam gathered six sons and four daughters around...