shapelessness

Like the contemporary criticism of Olympia, for example, which jeered at Manet for his crude indecency, or that of War and Peace, which condescended to Tolstoy for the inept "shapelessness" of the novel, it now seems magnificently misguided.

Justice to J.D. Salinger

There was one thing that survived the "shapelessness".

The Hindu - Front Page

He was clad in faded overalls and black cotton shirt, with hobnailed brogans on his feet, and on his head a hat whose shapelessness and stains advertised the rough usage of wind and rain and sun and camp-smoke.

All Gold Cañon

At least, one would argue that her body must be robust from her fashion of movement of it, though little could one divine the lines of it under the shapelessness of the furs.

CHAPTER I

She was clad entirely in white, and looked very young and quite tall in the sweeping folds of a holoku of elaborate simplicity and apparent shapelessness.

CHAPTER XV

Their window of perfection is indeed brief, a day or two at most, then a slow descent towards soft shapelessness.

Tender delights

Hanley Black surveyed his wife's criminal shapelessness and voluminousness of antediluvian, New-England swimming dress with a withering, contemplative eye.

THE KANAKA SURF

His edges had been chipped, but the result had not, he thought, been character --- only shapelessness, like an exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art. --- from Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene.

Lance Mannion:

Christ is simultaneously in the neighbourhood of the Father and in the neighbourhood of the sinner, the formlessness, the shapelessness and dissolution, the dis-integrity of creation.

'The Fellowship of the Baptized' - The John Coventry Memorial address

This contrast between the rare, well-made, already novelistic experience and the more common, messy, improvised shapelessness of ordinary existence explains the shift from the tidy social comedy of youth to the baffling weirdness of age -- and the exploded shape of this book.

Martin Amis's 'The Pregnant Widow' Is A 'Strange, Sparkling Novel' (New York Review)