Word: plot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Eliot himself, one of his play's harshest critics, has deplored its not fusing Greek story with modern one, its exalting "versification at the expense of plot and character." And all too often The Family Reunion seems remote just where it should be intense, seems to be abstraction without even the vividness of allegory. Bloodless, it fails to cut quite to the bone; it is only those inwardly dead in the play who ever seem outwardly alive...
...speakers are three schoolboys of present-day Paris who have "decided to model their lives on those of distinguished men." Bored by both their ordinary selves and their ordinary lives, they dream of rebellion, plots and seductions. Their big day comes when a worried spinster, who lives with an aristocratic family just outside Paris, tells "Valmont" about a plot worthy of Dumas: the haughty old head of the family has locked and bolted his pretty daughter Denise into her bedroom and will not let her out until she swears to break off an affair with a middleaged, married antique dealer...
Under the cheesy chinoiserie the plot is the same dreary triangle that has already served so many so badly. There is a fast and loose charmer who tempts the hero, but it is the little snow pea his wise old father had chosen who gets him in the end. All this is unfolded in an atmosphere that varies between Mr. Hammerstein's old Norman Rockwell whole someness and a new, Broadway, meretriciousness of second-rate sick jokes and falsie gags. Mechandizing the cuteness of a whole covey of little children (including one with a hula hoop...
...thunder of nays that resounded from the faculty meeting last week over Dean Elder's plan to limit Ph.D. study to four years must have come either from aroused protective instincts or from simple misunderstanding. Possibly the various departments suspect in the Dean's proposals a plot to catalyze his present comfortable hold into an iron grip. Or they may think the proposals would really alter the structure of graduate study. Both of these fears should cease...
There are two kinds of authors - those who write better than they plot and those who plot better than they write. With his 22nd novel, Veteran Nevil Shute again proves himself one of the best practitioners of Group 2. Shute's surefire system is to take some typical or moving theme -nuclear fallout in On the Beach, race prejudice in The Chequer Board, homeless children in Pied Piper. He weaves in plenty of stirring incidents and peoples his pages with strongly sympathetic, highly moral characters who land deep in a pit of trouble in the first chapter, are often...