For all the grim doings that he depicts, for all the ugliness and violence underlying the calm surfaces of country life, Dumont binds the diverse moods and impulses — the bumptious comedy and the steadfast devotion, the free-spirited exuberance and the burning hatred — with a serene and vigorous exaltation in seeing and in being.
For all the grim doings that he depicts, for all the ugliness and violence underlying the calm surfaces of country life, Dumont binds the diverse moods and impulses the bumptious comedy and the steadfast devotion, the free-spirited exuberance and the burning hatred with a serene and vigorous exaltation in seeing and in being.
And, second, whether the character he depicts here, for all its vigor, is anything more than a jerk.
He turns the mysteriousness of what he depicts into fertile ground for painterly dexterity that is meaty and sophisticated, a little scary but never crude or melodramatic.
As for Democrats, he depicts them as hapless, unfocused and reeling from self-inflicted wounds.
But what he depicts – what he is preserving for posterity is not the outline of his wife's life, but the outline of his life, what he has accomplished.
In Men of the Docks he depicts overcoated men grimly searching for work on the freezing, Brooklyn waterfront with an ocean liner looming above them and the Manhattan skyline in the background.
He became a member of Footlights during what he depicts inevitably as a nadir for the august comedic institution, despite the fact that his fellow members included David Mitchell and Ayoade's former writing partner John Oliver, now the Daily Show With John Stewart's Emmy-Award-winning British correspondent.
Perhaps Wesley has intentionally opted to keep plot specifics as indistinct as the personal boundaries of the characters he depicts, but such ambiguity makes for a less-than-satisfying conclusion at curtain call.
St . Louis for example, he depicts as "an elaborate shell of a coffin without the humanity of a corpse inside". He is especially harsh on American women and writes of an encounter with "four slimy female reporters all dirty and evil-looking like retired whores". Such statements would hardly have earned Masefield honors, literary or otherwise, today.
For 20 years now, since Bright Lights, Big City exploded the sedate world of American publishing with its glittering irony and the relish of its portrayal of hedonistic, narcissistic Manhattan society hurtling towards glorious self-destruction, McInerney, like his hero, F Scott Fitzgerald, has been famed as much for living the decadent life he depicted as for immortalising it in fiction.
