Constructor: Drew Schmenner
Relative difficulty: on the slow side for a Tuesday (partially because the grid is an oversized 16x15)
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THEME:"THAT'S ALL / SHE WROTE!" (18A: With 63-Across, "The end" ... or what can be said about the novels in the clues for 25-, 38- and 52-Across)— famous women authors who wrote just one novel:
Theme answers:
This one started out weird, as I got the "THAT'S ALL" Part easily enough, and I could see it was the front end of the revealer but the clue went on and on and wasn't much help, so I figured the second part of the revealer would be "FOLKS!" Then two things happened to make me sour on the puzzle very quickly. Well, three things. First, the fill in the north, everything under numbers 4 through 7, was just awful.
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Five things:
Relative difficulty: on the slow side for a Tuesday (partially because the grid is an oversized 16x15)
Theme answers:
- SYLVIA PLATH (25A: Author of "The Bell Jar" (1963))
- ANNA SEWELL (38A: Author of "Black Beauty" (1877))
- EMILY BRONTË (52A: Author of "Wuthering Heights" (1847))
1: a frame for supporting barrels2: a frame structure raised on side supports so as to span over or around something: such asa: a platform made to carry a traveling crane and supported by towers or side frames running on parallel tracksalso : a movable structure with platforms at different levels used for erecting and servicing rockets before launchingb: a structure spanning several railroad tracks and displaying signals for each (merriam-webster.com)
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Concentrated weakness that's completely inexplicable (it's not like the theme is particularly dense or anything). Something about hitting POL SNL "I'M ON" SISI and even AMASS just sapped me of solving energy. The grid feels really oddly built, with these biggish but bizarrely isolated NW / SE corners. Which leads me to the second souring moment—the extremely narrow entries / exits to those NW / SE corners. One square wide. Ugh. Absolute flow killer.
Flow was killed much worse than usual today because LOL what the hell is a GANTRY (if it's not an Elmer GANTRY, I mean). I had the "G" at the end of IM'ING and thought "cool, now I will exit this claustrophobic corner. But no. In the end I needed nearly every single cross to get GANTRY. Experience of not knowing GANTRY made infinitely worse by the dumb narrow doorways into / out of that corner. Later came the third souring moment—when I thought "wait, that is NOT all that SYLVIA PLATH wrote (!?!?)" and then had to dive back into the thousand-word clue to see that oh, THAT'S ALL SHE WROTE *novel*-wise. Huh. OK. I guess that is true. I actually like the theme concept OK. The "SHE WROTE" part definitely provided an aha and brought a lot of coherence and thus likability back to the grid. But the bad fill up top, the fussiness of the narrow grid passageways, and the highly qualified nature of the theme's core concept all made the solving experience feel a bit wobbly.
Five things:
- 3D: Many a character in Kerouac's "On the Road" (BEATNIK) — It's weird how he's a "beat" writer but I don't associate him with BEATNIKs at all. When I think BEATNIKs I think berets and black shirts and cigarettes and coffeehouses and jazz, baby, but maybe also folk music ... I dunno. I have a poster of the movie "The Beat Generation" on my living room wall and it's got Mamie Van Doren and Louis Armstrong on it, and neither one of those people lives in the same place as my head as Kerouac (in whose writing I don't really have any interest).
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- 60A: Question of apathy ("DO I CARE?") — hard to imagine this wasn't originally"DO I DARE?" / DUE. "DO I CARE?" is an absolutely sneering rhetorical question, a fact which the clue totally fails to pick up. I just think "DO I DARE?" is a better, more imaginable phrase here. "What do I care?" or "Why should I care?" seem more ... actual than this answer.
- 28D: Dish associated with the Valencia region of Spain (PAELLA) — hope you liked Monday's PAELLA, 'cause we're having it again tonight!
- 64D: Charlemagne's domain: Abbr. (HRE) — again I don't know why the fill in those NW / SE corners is so weak. I thought HRE (short for Holy Roman Empire) had been hunted to extinction. I feel like I haven't seen HRE since the reign of Charlemagne.* And all jammed up with other repeaters like ARIA and EIEIO ... as that SE corner says, IT'S BAD (58A: "You don't even want to know").
- 13D: Protein in. horns and hair (KERATIN) — had -ATIN, wrote GELATIN. It felt wrong as I was writing it, but not being a protein expert, I just went with it ...
*first appearance of HRE in 2021. There was only one appearance in all of 2020. 2019 saw five HREs, though, yikes. Those are late '90s numbers. Anyway, it's classic crosswordese and honestly it's fine if you absolutely need it and don't cram it in with a lot of other classic crosswordese.
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