Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Author Newby does the neatest possible job with his plot. His comic characters, such as the Pasha and his wife, are all the more comic because they are described affectionately, tolerantly, almost respectfully. The blurb's comment that The Picnic "might have been called a comic Passage to Egypt" proves to be at least half true, because Author Newby knows to perfection the Forster art of speaking softly. Unlike his master, however, he has not the brute strength to carry a big stick...
When Thomas Mann came to America in 1938, he said simply: "Wherever I am is German culture." To Germans rallying against Hitler, or, like himself, driven into exile, the declaration was a defiant battle cry; to non-Germans it was something of a portent. "The plot of every one of his novels," said a critic, "concerns an organism whose vitality is threatened; one can never be sure whether the crisis will end ineluctably in death or whether it is not instead the critical point in a rebirth." Because the vitality of that old organism Europe appeared to be ebbing towards...
...Simenon's working method is simple. He writes a chapter a day for ten or eleven days, and then he has a novel. He has written one in as little as 25 hours, gets edgy if it takes as long as two weeks. He seldom has a plot or a story in mind when he starts, but his thinking keeps up with the machine-gun speed of his typewriter once he begins. Disparagingly he has said: "I write fast because I do not have the brains to write slow." But he does believe there is no reason why fast...
...Never Too Young (Paramount) stars the overworked team of Martin & Lewis in the same overworked plot. This time. Dean Martin is a teacher at a girls' school and Cutup Jerry Lewis is a barber's apprentice...
...take front-office to front-office noodling to get this concretized"), and spurts of sly wit ("Since it was only 8 a.m., it was too early to have a drink, so we were forced to eat on an empty stomach"). After a few more slapsticky twists of the plot, John Henry and Fairweather's friends triumph over Senator Ransom's "Neanderthal bloc," and Fort Knox seems well on its way to becoming the biggest compost heap in the world...