Word: plot
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...Shepard charts with savage humor the cruelties exchanged among a grindingly poor rural family. Slaughtering their animals has inured them to violence. Sharing the isolation of farm life has made them eager to sneak off. Knowing one another's sore spots has only rendered their aim more deadly. The plot resembles the save-the-homestead movies released last year: the farm is hopelessly insolvent but is sought by developers. Shepard, however, does not indulge in sentiment about vanishing ways of life. His focus is on familial stealth and cunning, on betrayals of husband by wife, brother by sister, parent...
...opera composers, has suppressed his penchant for blatant politicization to produce a subtle, cautionary fable. Bond's libretto tells the story of a pacifist band of petit bourgeois cats who have formed the Royal Society for the Protection of Rats and have been rearing a young orphan mouse. The plot concerns the ill-starred triangle of Tom (Baritone Scott Reeve), Minette (Soprano Inga Nielsen) and her husband Lord Puff (Tenor Michael Myers). Seeing the fatal outcome of the affair, the mouse Louise wisely decides not to rely on the professed good intentions of natural enemies...
...expectations drove Ruth to murder, Marilyn to fatal overdose. Metaphorically, both women "die of intimate exposure," to quote a character in Insignificance known only as the Actress (Theresa Russell) but plainly meant to represent Monroe. The other three main characters find real-life correlatives just as easily. Indeed, the plot could be synopsized as follows: What if Albert Einstein (Michael Emil) were threatened in his hotel room by Senator Joe McCarthy (Tony Curtis), then visited by Marilyn Monroe, who explains the theory of relativity to its creator, then interrupted by Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey), who wants a divorce or maybe...
...through the corridors of power. Among his drones are Mitch (Gabe Jarret), an innocent 15-year-old prodigy; Kent (Robert Prescott), who is teacher's pet, half toady, half Gestapo agent; and a case Hathaway has burned out (Jonathan Gries) until the others recruit him for the climactic revenge plot...
Safekeeping (Penzler; 202 pages; $15.95) and Fletch Won (Warner; 265 pages; $14.95) display the astonishing range of Gregory Mcdonald. After winning two Edgar Allan Poe awards (1975 and 1977) for the first books featuring the raffish investigative reporter Irwin Maurice Fletcher, Mcdonald declined into extended archness of phrase and plot. He found his way again in last year's Flynn's In, featuring his other series character, Boston Police Official Francis X. Flynn. The film of Fletch, starring Chevy Chase, was a summer comedy hit, and Fletch Won continues the upbeat pace. Here the brash young man is observed...