Word: motif
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...MOOR'S LAST SIGH (Pantheon). Salman Rushdie's first novel since The Satanic Verses exuberantly details the protagonist's absurd fall from the grace of a wealthy Indian childhood into the hands of a madman who plans to kill him once the story ends--an interesting motif for this particular author. But the hero survives, and Rushdie's bountiful comic narrative triumphs...
...mother versus daughter motif continues until a crucial fact suddenly comes to light that bridges the conflict and brings the two to reconciliation. It becomes apparent that Azalea resembles her mother as she was at that age: impulsive, free-spirited and committed to one thing despite all the uncertainty of youth. For Azalea at this point, it is discovering herself. For Jane, it was motherhood. Their dialogue usually seems genuine, though occasional lapses in acting quality compromise the exchange's spontaneity...
...sadly interesting motif of parallel dysfunctions ran through the Hiss family as well. Alger Hiss's father committed suicide rather savagely, slashing his throat with his own razor. Alger's sister Mary Ann also killed herself, by swallowing a bottle of caustic household cleanser...
...launched his career came to this then unknown, 24-year-old Southerner in a dream. One night in 1954, by his own account, Johns dreamed of painting a large American flag, and the next morning he got up and began to do so. He would play with the flag motif for several decades more, rendering the Stars and Stripes in wax encaustic paint on newspaper collage, in oil on canvas, in bronze, pencil and lithography. His fascination with it came, in part, from his very nuanced and ironic feelings about the function of art, particularly in America and especially after...
...that seem to have no raison d'etre, and are valued merely because Johns did them. What is the point of those tracings done from a reproduction of Cezanne's Bathers? As homages they're trivial; as formal studies they're as uninteresting as his tracings done from a motif of his old idol Marcel Duchamp. Perhaps it is true that, as his admirers believe, a sublimely arcane and complex intentionality lies behind the fragmented and mingily internalized imagery of late Johns, tying all its scattered hints together. But one does not have to be altogether a philistine to doubt...