Word: formulaic
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...introduces a medicine cabinet full of new pharmaceuticals and shaves more than 20 years off the women's ages (when Shadow opens in 1987, the women are roughly the same age they were when the first book ended in 1965), but she does little else to update Susann's formula. Anne and Neely still self-medicate, stage comebacks and sleep around, but the whole thing feels dutiful, even predictable. In her thinly veiled sketches of the wealthy and well known, Susann was one of the first to wallow in the lifestyles of the rich and infamous. She could not have...
...when he is good, he is spectacular. Roth's 1959 debut, Goodbye, Columbus, a collection of five stories and the title novella, won a National Book Award. Having leaped from promising to prizewinning in a single bound, Roth could have set about repeating the formula that had brought him such instant recognition. But one of his more intriguing aspects has been his refusal to tailor his work to anyone else's expectations. Within a decade of the delicate Jamesian fiction in Goodbye, Columbus, Roth wrote Portnoy's Complaint, a barbaric yawp of masturbatory misadventures and comic rage...
...miraculous has become mundane. Nothing new there: it is in the nature of pop culture to allow the vagrant innovation, then stretch it into a trend by pounding it into a formula. In the Disney cartoon "renaissance," the excitement of the first ones, from The Little Mermaid to The Lion King, ultimately faded, whether the studio stuck to the master plan (as in the 1997 Hercules) or tried to stretch it (as in the new Atlantis the Lost Empire...
...Friday agreement, the 1998 peace accord that introduced power sharing between unionists and nationalists. The turmoil saw paramilitary guns and bombs, British soldiers and riot police return to the streets just as the British and Irish governments convened talks aimed at reviving confidence in the agreement. But their preferred formula for ending the stalemate - a reduction in paramilitary weapons, cuts in Britain's military presence and alterations to the police - has been dented by the strife...
...view, Deng Xiaoping promoted the One Country, Two Systems formula to allow China to become more like Hong Kong, not the other way around. If Tung, out of a misplaced sense of patriotism, enacts anticult legislation to please Beijing's leaders, he will be doing his country a disservice. Tsang's remarks suggest moderation but even he left open the possibility of a future ban. "We are not legislating," he said last week, a statement that covers just the present, meaning the government might shift tack at any time. That would please the ignorant and the sycophants in China...