Word: joker
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...JOKER (319 pp.)-Jean Malaquais -Doubleday...
...looks like unshaded hell. The harbingers of doom, headed by Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four), have now been joined by Frenchman Jean Malaquais. His world of the future is as grim a nightmare as theirs. But the hero of Malaquais' The Joker is not one to surrender to a nightmare. What makes him different from most of his fictional counterparts is his unbreakable will to live...
...Super-Babitch. The Joker in the original French is Le Gaffeur, a fellow who always does the wrong thing. Pierre Javelin lives in a police state called the City, where the sky is never visible and people live in parallelepipeds, geometrical monstrosities housing up to 5,000 families. Pierre is not aware that he has done anything wrong when, arriving home one night, he cannot turn his key in the lock. A giant "with a Russian mustache" is living in the apartment, and Pierre's wife is gone...
...Winning Joker. Novelist Malaquais' triumphant joker seems to come from a stacked deck when Pierre, le gaffeur, wins against the overwhelming odds of the City. His prescription, a sardonically simple one, is set forth in an epigraph from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre...
...Confidential Clerk Eliot again presents what looks like a group of very worldly people. In the first act he encourages us to assimilate them to familiar theatrical types. Lucasta Angel is a rather spoiled and forward young woman. B. Kaghan is a flashy sort of practical joker who is amusingly disrespectful concerning Lady Elizabeth, the absent-minded dowager who dabbles in spiritualism. After the first act there was much disappointed all in the lobby about the predictable lines, tired characterizations, and old fashioned exposition. In the second act our conceptions of these characters are wrenched out of shape. In response...