Dressed in casual black, with a pair of almost comically large black specs perched on his pale shaved head, he looks more like a nervy, etiolated physics student rather than a cult literary phenomenon.
Think of a film like "Full Metal Jacket" and you start to wonder whether its mood — etiolated, vicious, vinegar-thin — flowed not from the coolness of Stanley Kubrick but from the plain, annoying fact that, eight years before, Francis Ford Coppola had called all the shots.
Instead of the jazzy, vernacular, darkly humorous language he employed to such galvanic effect in "White Noise" and "Underworld," Mr. DeLillo has chosen here to use the spare, etiolated, almost Beckettian prose he used in his 2001 novella, "The Body Artist," and his 1987 play, "The Day Room".
It is not surprising that early racing paintings show animals that are etiolated and apparently long in the back: they are trained until every ounce of 'condition' – spare flesh – is sweated away.
Ms. Kazan's Harper, an etiolated blonde who suggests a cornfed country girl lost to urban blight, has the conviction of her delusions.
These were buildings no taller than the Dakota, but in 1885 The New York Times urged restrictive legislation and darkly predicted that "if the streets were lined with eight-story buildings, half of the occupants would be deprived of sunlight, and their children would be etiolated like plants grown in a cellar".
Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani said that "instead of the jazzy, vernacular, darkly humorous language he employed to such galvanic effect in 'White Noise' and 'Underworld,' " Mr. DeLillo had chosen to use "spare, etiolated, almost Beckettian prose".
Her people have elongated faces and pale forms; they're etiolated Modiglianis.
Mid-left, there is a suggestion of head, etiolated in the same way as the head of Degas's stooping dancer.
The Guardian's Judith Mackrell applauded the 30-year-old Watson's performance as MacMillan's "emotionally mutilated" hero: "Pale and etiolated in his stiff palace uniform, alternating between extreme lassitude and hysterical game-playing, this Rudolf looks as if he has spent his childhood in dark shadows, pulling the wings off flies".
Suffice to say, not many records in 2010 will contain phrases like "faultlessly etiolated".
