The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.
ATTRIBUTION:
Renata Adler (b. 1938), U.S. author, film critic. “Salt into Old Scars,” Toward a Radical Middle (1971, first publ. 1963).
