Like all Lorrie Moore's work, this novel is elegant, sad and, best of all, incredibly, dazzlingly, pirouetting-ly witty.
Elegant, sad, funny, enlightening.
For all their cocktails at the Petit Bar at the Ritz, all their elegant, sad-eyed women and mustachioed villains, these are not escapist novels.
Both were ravishingly elegant and sad.
"The Sondheim Celebration," like "Follies in Concert," had the feel of an elegant, happy-sad farewell party put on in the face of imminent darkness.
Leroy Carr sings "Christmas in Jail -- Ain't That a Pain" (1929), an elegant, funny-sad blues plea: "Santa, Santa, Santa, come here to me in jail/Bring me a Christmas present: someone to post my bail".
A tourist faints, perhaps with heat, or fatigue, or some kind of aesthetic overload, and then Sorrentino pulls off a superb coup — a hard cut to a thoroughly outrageous and deafening Eurotrash party being thrown that evening for Jep Gambardella, an elegant, louche, sad-eyed bachelor, now 65 years old, played with a fascinating mask of charm by Toni Servillo.
John Tyrrell is a sad, elegant, mother-fixated Lot whom Myrtle calls "the most refined man in my life".
It's an exceptionally elegant, witty yet sad instance of identity politics in art.
Campbell is Campbell Scott, who created an ineffably sad, elegant Robert Benchley in Mr. Rudolph's 1994 film "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle".
Mostly, Mr. McCourt said in a recent interview, what changed in the years between 1947 and 1985 is that gays went from being hopelessly outside the margins, creating a world that was at once sad, elegant and creative, to being marketed to and marketed by the never-ending machinery of commerce.
