SOURCE: "Ring Lardner's The Love Nest': Illusion, Reality, and the Movie Mogul," in The International Fiction Review, Vol. XVI, No. 2, Summer, 1989, pp. 103-05.

In the following essay, Payne describes how the protagonist of "The Love Nest" violently manipulates language to impose his will

Ring Lardner criticism has come a long way since Clifton Fadiman's comprehensive denunciations in his essay of 1933, "Ring Lardner and the Triangle of Hate" ("Except Swift, no writer has gone farther on hatred alone")¹ and James T. Farrell's equally sweeping accolades eleven years later in "Ring Lardner's Success-Mad World" ("no other American writer has achieved the mastery of satire which Lardner had")² More recently, Webb (1960)³ Bordewyck (1982)⁴ and Gilead (1985)⁵ have helped to redirect the focus of Lardner commentary, with the result that we are now able to view the author in a more subtle light, as also deeply concerned with "the abusive potentiality of cultural codes...