Word: plot
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Three heroines, living in London and in their mid-40s when the decade of the 1980s dawns, provide a focus for Drabble's tumultuous plot: Liz Headleand, twice married and a successful psychotherapist; Alix Bowen, ditto and a believer in socially useful work like teaching English literature to female criminals; Esther Breuer, unmarried and a dilettantish specialist in the early Italian Renaissance. Although they have taken different paths, Liz, Alix and Esther share a long friendship and common bonds dating back to their student days at Cambridge in the 1950s. "These three women," Drabble notes, "it will readily and perhaps...
Convinced of their superior intellect, the murderers plot a dastardly proof of their innocence: they invite their victim's father to a dinner party and serve the food on the very trunk in which they've hidden the body. Unluckily for them, though, they've left a little piece of the rope they used to strangle their victim dangling from the lid of the trunk...
Salomy took some liberties with the script, with mixed results. The inclusion of readings from De Quincey's satiric essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts" and from the New York Times' grisly converage of a related 1924 murder gave the plot additional credibility. But his decision to play the last scene with alternate endings only weakens a climactic curtain...
...call The Bonfire of the Vanities Wolfe's first novel is to make a distinction without too much difference. The ingeniously rigged plot is clearly fictional, but the details of New York City life, high and low, leap from the legman's notebook. The novel first appeared in Rolling Stone four years ago and ran in 27 installments. Since then, Wolfe has thoroughly rewritten it. The crucial change was to make the leading character a Wall Street broker (pre Black Monday) instead of a writer. "Writers are not much affected by scandal," says the author, "but bond salesmen...
...Bonfire are not gratuitous. They are embedded in convincing contexts and experienced through the eyes, ears and nerve endings of the characters. This technique is what makes Wolfe's journalism so vital and gives him authority as a novelist. This, and his ability to handle an imaginative and intricate plot that welds his descriptions of dinner parties, restaurant games, Wall Street trading and courthouse chaos into more than a tour de force. Even at more than 600 pages, Bonfire moves with a swift comic logic. It has become a critical cliche to say that a book is hard...