This is a deeply affecting book, and despite its gritty prose, colourful language and hardboiled trappings, a tender one, its sustained undertow of tenderness and melancholy giving it a surprising delicacy.
Like other pastorals, the dialogue is a cross between tenderness and melancholy.
But its expressive combination of tenderness and melancholy is something that belongs definitively to Elgar.
His painting Pipes of Pan from the same year goes even further in its homoerotic tenderness and melancholy.
Arbus could be cruel, but tenderness and melancholy were her finest modes of expression, the emotions that reveal themselves after her best pictures leave their first impression, which is often alarm.
Holding the Christ child in her left arm, the Virgin looks beyond him with melancholy tenderness, while the child reaches out a tiny hand to brush aside her veil.
The Washington Post called it a tune that "starts off with Enya-like tenderness and Celtic melancholy before colliding with the iceberg of overproduction". Over the years, as with anything extremely popular, there was plenty of "My Heart Will Go On" backlash, particularly as it became overplayed.
The first they called blanditia, a vague but expressive word by which they meant softness of outline, warmth of colouring, a fine and almost voluptuous feeling for beauty of every kind, and a pleading and melancholy tenderness; this is most obvious in his descriptive passages and in his portrayal of emotion.
Writing in The Times, A. O. Scott called the film "a deeply personal piece of art that never descends into the confessional or the therapeutic, and a work of social and literary criticism that never lectures or hectors, but rather, with melancholy, tenderness and wit, manages to sing".
In this way I rediscovered "White Noise," by Don DeLillo, which I'd been assigned in college ("The Modern Anti-Hero") and always thought of as a deliberate, thesis-driven black comedy; I'd never noticed the tenderness and the melancholy, the gorgeous, crystalline prose.
