Word: comically
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...Anatomy Lesson concludes Philip Roth's comic trilogy...
There is also the matter of Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's fictional alter id and hero of a comic trilogy that has forever flattened the myth of the glamorous writing life. Zuckerman, of course, is not Roth but rather the fullest and most personal expression of a theme that has come to dominate his work: the mayhem unleashed by those who would escape their pasts. This may be what David Kepesh in Roth's The Professor of Desire had in mind when he spoke stiltedly of "the destructive power-of those who see a way out of the shell...
...Zuckerman trilogy distorts those rewards with comic punishments. Roth's inspiration for the character came after several trips to Czechoslovakia. He was stirred by the contrast between the benign annoyances of literary celebrity in the U.S. and the repression of writers in Prague, Kafka's home town. "In America," he observes, "everything goes and nothing matters. While in Eastern Europe, nothing goes and everything matters." The calculated absurdity of the Zuckerman books is that everything goes and everything matters...
...Mordecai Richler attempts to lift humorists out of the high chair and onto the Louis Quinze. He ransacks old collections and ranges through the century, from Stephen Leacock to Fran Lebowitz. Anything that smacks of adolescence is jettisoned: "You will meet with no Dorothy Parker here... I found her comic stories brittle, short on substance." And nothing mild is allowed: to go through Robert Benchley's work is "to discover a good many of his sketches astonishingly bland, disarmingly gentle." The 65 pieces that pass Richler's scrutiny are trenchant, acrimonious and sharp. Most of them are also...
...year's success, and this year the talent scouts came back with Tom Cruise, who looks like a baby-faced Christopher Reeve. Here he is, Superman in miniature (Reeve is 6 ft. 4 in., Cruise 5 ft. 9 in.): the hooded eyes, the sculpted body, the off-beat comic timing, the self-deprecating manner, the winning smile. Cruise played a psychotic cadet in Taps, a winsome greaser in The Outsiders, but it was in Paul Brickman's sleek and sexy summer comedy Risky Business that Cruise first turned on the wattage. Star power has translated into box-office...