This is an engaging voice: earnest without being morose; honest without being exhibitionistic; understated, humble and wise from years of trusting in questions more than in answers.
Leary's fighting-Irish characters can be exhausting after a while — they tend to careen from overbearing pugnacity to morose regretfulness, without stopping for long on any middle ground, but that pattern makes sense in "Rescue Me," since Tommy's life has no middle ground.
Though not all the pets in these books pass away — one is unjustly separated from its young owner, and another apparently goes missing without, it turns out, ever existing — all of the stories dip a pinkie toe into the emotional pool of loss without being morose or preachy.
As Mario Luna sat before the press, a morose, pitted-faced Chuckle Brother without the chuckling, he was asked how he felt about taking a job with no authority whatsoever.
I have a busy career, and I have four children all under the age of 14, and my life is complicated enough without watching boring, morose or moronic news shows in the morning.
The longer they went without speaking, the more morose he became.
Someone who could get up in the morning without being held captive by morose thoughts doing their wild and wily gymnastics of despair as she measures out tablespoons of coffee from their snappy little aluminum bag: You shouldn't.
Her attention to the flow of day-to-day lives is underscored by immense psychological weight, without the slightest sense the drama is morose or heavy-handed.
Though Earth is now habitable, more or less, if some are going to live, then others have to die, and these characters ask themselves who and what is worth dying for without bogging down the narrative with overdoses of morose self-pity.
ERIC GRODE BIGGEST LAUGH (UNEXPECTED) Nestled in the middle of "Fragments," Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne's setting of five short Samuel Beckett pieces, was "Act Without Words II," an exercise in contrasts between the eternally morose Marcello Magni and the equally vivacious Jos Houben.
