Word: cliches
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London is literature's Victorian ghost-story capital. Did you have to grapple with everything that came before in that genre? I definitely wanted to ground my story in all the stuff that had come before. A couple of reviewers have faulted me for using all these terrible old clichés, but that was actually the project - to take all the tropes of the 19th century English novel and try to reanimate them. The book is definitely supposed to comment and hopefully expand on London ghost stories of yore...
...competition side, evolution by selection is an inherently competitive process. It's a cliché that "the good men are all taken, permanent bachelors or gay." And there's some truth to this. The number of truly desirable and available men is limited. So women are in sexual competition with other women for access to the most desirable men. Modern women are the descendants of ancestral mothers who succeeded in besting other women in these sexual competitions...
...drop in the President's poll numbers represents a natural political process. When politicians talk about spending their political capital, they are talking about their poll numbers - and the cliché is somewhat misleading. They are actually investing their political capital, hoping for a greater return if their gamble succeeds. George W. Bush invested his capital in privatizing Social Security, and the stock tanked. Barack Obama is investing in health-care reform. We are at the point of the legislative process where all seems hopeless, but Obama should be heartened by the fact that most of his Republican adversaries oppose...
...novel (national epic, family saga and testy teen drama knotted into one) meanders - including an abrupt jaunt to Granada, where Zakia and Zaki vacation just so, it seems, Sethi can make a point about the high potential of Islamic culture. And it's burdened by clichés: the love of all things Bollywood; mingy mothers-in-law; the kid who escapes to an American university. Still, Sethi's sharp eye, worthy of being an entomologist's, makes the book a steadily absorbing read, all 400-plus pages of it. Recollecting his first day at a private boy's academy...
...when asked how success could be measured, he could only fall back on an old Washington cliché: "We'll know it when...