Word: meaninglessness
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...held by a new school of novelistless writers. From Cervantes to Hemingway, storytellers have assumed that man has hopes and aspirations, and that they could be expressed meaningfully. Bosh, says the new school. Man is a blob, creeping and leaping about a world he cannot control, his words meaningless or hypocritical or both. The best thing a novelist can do, the argument runs, is to ditch the novel as it is now known and write a new kind that shows man as the pitiable blob he is. Two new books by two charter members of the blob school...
...stayed glued to my set to watch U.N. representatives at work on a grave international problem. If the members of that "peace-loving audience" of popular programs truly cared to preserve the pleasant status quo of their lives, they would do well to pay less attention to the meaningless escapism of Dotto, Play Your Hunch and For Love or Money...
...them could understand the lyrics, but none of them could escape the tune. Wherever they went in Italy this summer, tourists were attacked by the lilting, insidious and all-but-meaningless lyrics of Nel Blu, Dipinto di Bin (In the Blue, Painted Blue). From nightclub star to curbside troubadour, everyone was belting out the refrain of Italy's most popular song. And the tourists were humming it before they went home...
...energy all right; he is writing a thesis, plays catch with his wife and sons, and runs a troop of Boy Scouts. But Author Barth matches him with a crushing tragedy in the face of which his pragmatism is meaningless and his nihilism a cheerless thing. The agent of his undoing is the narrator of the book, Jacob Horner, one of the most fascinatingly dreadful characters to appear in a long time. He is self-described as "owl. peacock, chameleon, donkey and popinjay, fugitive from a medieval bestiary." In more modern terms, he is also a manic-depressive...
...readers may well be of two minds as to who had the right of the matter - the celebrated bluenose or the historian of "Bluebeard.'' At any rate, those who look to the book for bits of cheerful pornography will be disappointed. Satanism is dismal stuff, and blasphemy meaningless to those who do not believe in the things blasphemed against. In many ways, Author Huysmans own story is more interesting than his book...