Word: mindlessness
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Crisis of Identity. In Light in August, Faulkner demonstrated how the preoccupation with race can make it tragically impossible for a man to know who he really is, and dramatized the mindless virulence of white reaction to miscegenation. Joe Christmas, the book's hell-ridden hero, is a remarkably modern figure: in the psychological cant phrase of 1964, he suffers an "identity crisis" because he thinks he is part Negro successfully passing for white. Compounding his agonizing psychological fracture, Joe Christmas takes for his mistress a woman who embodies the Southerner's hated notion of the "outside agitator...
...written at all but dictated, Napoleon style, at top speed to at least two secretaries at once, and the resulting manuscript corrected with a glass in one hand, a cigar in the other, and no place to hold the blue pencil. Even the title is a piece of mindless sensationalism: Berlin was not a battle, let alone the last...
Viva Las Vegas has the wholesome, mindless spontaneity it takes to create a successful Elvis Presley movie. This one gambles on hips, not chips. Chorus girls scamper through such neon fleshpots as the Stardust, Flamingo, Tropicana and Sahara, and Elvis himself, as wrinkleproof an example of modern packaging as anyone has yet produced, sings, dances, swims, water-skis, flies a helicopter and finally enters his baby-blue racing car in a big, exciting race referred to as the Las Vegas Grand Free...
...Academic Year," for example, is a mindless compilation of equally mindless CRIMSON front-page news stories. It lists in perfunctory paragraphs local personalities prominent this year, speakers who visited Harvard, and educational issues mentioned in the CRIMSON...
...novelist loses control when Leonard falls under the influence of Victor Tolson, a muscular, mindless working-class homosexual who lives in the housing project that surrounds the Radcliffe mansion. Tolson lurks about the shrubbery like the hound of the Baskervilles, and sexual symbols parade through the paragraphs wearing sandwich signs. Superfluous minor characters become infected with the author's garrulity, deliver portentous sermons, and then drift off to irresolution. The dry prose becomes dewy. There are long, dare-taking sex scenes of the kind that, in he-she form, would seem overwritten in a Frank Yerby novel. Storey...