Word: plot
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...singing Happy Birthday to President John Kennedy four months before his death. Mailer may have carefully hedged and qualified here, but the innuendo is there. Mailer sees right wing profit in allying her with the two men and uses that as a motive for a CIA or FBI plot to kill her, rather than the suicide by Nembutal cited by the coroner...
Miles is fleeing from an over-protective, domineering husband; Reynolds from a past which includes the murder of his Indian wife following her rape by another man. (She was named Cat Dancing--hence the title.) The film's spare plot, its classically alienated characters, and its setting in the empty Western desert all fuel the hope that it will reveal something of the inner drives of its characters, and sketch their liberation in the uncivilized freedom of a desert getaway. What can these people learn about civilization by leaving...
...tracks, as Moynahan knows; the Watchung caper is a fictionally spiced version of several successful corporate moves into Princeton and environs in recent years. The novel's dedication ("To the Millstone River Valley and to the memory of lost green fields") marks it as a valedictory, but the plot refuses to say goodbye. In the course of telling the way it was, Moynahan veers wishfully into the way he thinks it should have been-an entertaining rejoinder thought up after the debate has ended...
...often, important sequences of plot were--albeit in Digest tradion--condensed into a few lines. Screenplay and song writers Richard and Robert Sherman evidently assumed that their film audience would already know the Tom Sawyer story, and there was consequently no need to go into it at any great length. While this might have been a worthy thought, it had the unfortunate result of pacing the film so that the brief scenes of story material appeared at times as no more than quick fillers between often absurdly drawn-out musical numbers...
...plot that is little more than a simple, formal dance of death must be well served in the telling. McGuane brings powers of concentration to writing that recall Camus as much as Hemingway. Unlike Camus, McGuane is no thinker, but his Key West is as palpable as the Algiers of The Stranger. His prose shimmers like heat: "Thunderous light fills the city and everyone moves in stately flotation." Ninety-Two in the Shade is the best book yet of a very strong young writer. · Martha Duffy