Word: plot
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Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” is one of the few recent novels that has achieved commercial as well as critical success. Given McCarthy’s elegant minimalist style and simple, episodic plot, I wondered how this post-apocalyptic novel was capable of capturing the national imagination. It was only after attempting to read Philip Roth’s 1997 novel “American Pastoral,” however, that the merits of “The Road” became apparent. One can learn important things from a novel without even...
...that, despite its size, centers itself around big questions, such as the unknowable power of space and time to erase, restructure, recreate. As usual, DeLillo’s concern for the shadow of self-consciousness falls over this work, altering the gravity of his story’s simple plot...
...when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.” This, the abstract framework, is the most important aspect of DeLillo’s novel, more so than a development of characters or the lack thereof, the progression of plot or its absence altogether...
...main character, a famous stage actor, spends most of the evening in a dressing gown delivering bons mots to an entourage of fellow theater people. In Perry's show, a sharp-tongued grandmother delivers sassy put-downs and motivational lectures to a brood of squabbling family members. Coward's plot reaches a climax as the actor finds out that several pestering women have all booked passage on the same boat he's taking to Africa. Perry's culminates with the cast enlisting the audience in a sing-along of Earth, Wind and Fire hits. At the Broadway theater, I didn...
...plot revolves around Shirley, a single mother with grown children, who learns at the outset that her cancer has spread and she has four to six weeks to live. Accepting the news with barely a flinch, she tries to tell her extended family, only to find they are too caught up in their own troubles to pay much attention. Among the brood: a son whose bitchy fiancée wants him to get into the dope trade so she'll have enough money to open a boutique and an older daughter who reveals that her younger "brother" is actually...