waywardness

Ultimately, though, the author torques her contrarianism past trolling, past knee-jerk philosophizing and past satire, alchemizing a critique of literary culture in all its ideological waywardness.

In his blurb for the book, legendary short-story writer Wells Tower praises Koekkoek’s “painful tales of calamity and waywardness” — a situation I now found relatable.

Many of them, with vocal techniques built for tonal blend and rhythmic precision in a chorus, favored a straight tone that gleamed like white light but also exposed waywardness in pitch.

With his wide forehead and a broad, elastic face, he is an actor of unusual precision, but there’s a vein of waywardness to him, too, a wildness only barely contained.

This probably explains why Ashton infuses Julia with a kind of wildness, a hint of waywardness under and around the sparkle.