Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Even though it has been 30 years since Allen Drury published Advise and Consent, the landmark novel of backstairs intrigue on Capitol Hill, its plot remains eerily contemporary. Against the backdrop of a brutal confirmation battle reminiscent of the John Tower nomination, the 1959 novel portrays an earnest young Senator who tries in vain to resist political blackmail over a homosexual encounter in his distant past. But the Senator is driven to suicide when he learns that an unsavory syndicated columnist is about to print the politically devastating charges. A fictional Washington Post executive explains haplessly that while no responsible...
Ironically, the coup was preceded by weeks of rumors in Cairo that the exiled Nimeiri would soon stage a comeback, but his desire to return to power seems unrelated to last week's revolt. It was apparently a homegrown plot led by impatient brigadier generals, not the senior command. The political direction of the new regime is uncertain, but the draconian nature of its decrees indicates that the new leadership means business. Its first orders: the dissolution of parliament and political parties, a ban on political opposition, the disbanding of labor unions and the cancellation of newspaper licenses...
...some cases, you and your roommate will have what divorce courts call "irreconcilable differences," a euphemism for "I hate you--DIE!" In some cases, you will plot to kill, or at least maim, the person who has been inflicted on you. In some of those cases, rare though they may be, you will succeed...
Having enlisted the audience's sympathies, and its knowing nods that the first playlet shows what life is really like, Sherman reveals in the second half that Table is not reality but invention -- the plot, in fact, of a famous '60s novel that a Hollywood producer proposes to contort into an MTV- influenced musical. Sherman's sprawling, ambitious piece has any number of themes, most powerfully the idea that art comforts us by letting us focus on microcosmic disasters so that we can ignore the global ones. Dominating an exceptional cast are Rupert Graves as the young artist...
...Gorky Park (1981), Martin Cruz Smith showed a good way to turn one among the thousands of detective novels published annually into a runaway best seller. The three crucial steps: 1) construct a plot with plenty of corpses and exfoliating complexities; 2) provide a beleaguered and therefore sympathetic hero, one whose problem involves not only solving a crime but avoiding extermination by a small army of people who do not wish the truth to be known; 3) set the action in a place that is inaccessible and romantically forbidding -- in the case of Gorky Park, Moscow and environs...