Word: flashbacks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...plan: a good man, Virgil Caudill, caught in a crushing predicament not of his making, commits a murder that seems unavoidable, abandons his home in the Kentucky hill country and survives precariously in Montana. The pages that narrate this contain no misdirection, no writerish word tasting, not even a flashback or shift in point of view, just fierce attention to the moment at hand. It is hard to see how Offutt?s chapters could be more effective in the skill of their telling. Yet the pieces of the novel don't really hang together, notes Skow. There are at least...
...FLASHBACK...
...finally does appear, he wears pale blue contact lenses, which make him look more frightening than the smoke would suggest. But King Hamlet's unfortunate run-in with Bausch and Lomb makes little sense and loses its effect when the living King Hamlet appears during one of the many flashback montages later on--wearing the same lenses and looking just as ethereal and possessed as he did when dead...
...collapses just as his siblings have predicted, Brad comes close to a moral moment of truth--should he kill his mother, for all their sakes?--and Farnsworth does a good job in this scene, alternately stricken and hopeful. But the tension of the moment is dissipated in a ghostly flashback, which takes us back to the months before the lost baby died, leading us to believe that it was this event that pushed Mamma over the edge. As this was crystal clear already, this final scene comes across as contrived and melodramatic...
...Flashback to Dec. 21, 1988. I was crawling along the corridor floor of the motel room where Pan Am had placed me after my husband and I had spent hours at J.F.K. We'd been forced to go to the airport because the Pan Am phone lines were busy all day, and the only news we were getting was from TV. By the time I was in the motel it was late at night, and I had learned the truth. My charming, vibrant daughter, my Theo who sang like an angel and had a golden future, was dead...