Word: plotting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After the vast tundra of his last book, Against the Day, which was a thousand-plus pages, with more than a hundred or so scurrying characters and a shape-shifting plot that went everywhere and nowhere, Thomas Pynchon has decided to give his fan base a break. His seventh novel is practically beach reading. Inherent Vice (Penguin Press; 369 pages) is a comic-noir detective tale set in Los Angeles around 1970, not long after the Manson murders added their special note to the already twitchy local vibe...
...Shasta shows up on his doorstep asking for help. It appears that her new squeeze, the powerful real estate mogul Mickey Wolfmann, may be the target of a kidnapping scheme. When Mickey disappears - and Shasta too - the lovelorn Doc, with quantities of superior weed, plunges into a many-layered plot. It involves, among other things, the LAPD, organized crime, disorganized crime, a lecherous dentist and the Golden Fang, which is sometimes a mysterious schooner, sometimes a no-nonsense drug cartel. Pynchonesque multitudes crowd into the picture. Tight-lipped federales, stoner lawyers, ex-con neo-Nazis with a big thing...
...Blending plot elements of Double Indemnity and Natural Born Killers with the ripe sensuality of Francis Coppola's take on Dracula, the film should make audiences sit up in startled pleasure, as if they'd just received the most luscious neck-bite. So take a break from the summer's zombified blockbusters and surrender to the crimson ecstasy of Thirst...
Standing among his knotted, 160-year-old Romorantin vines on a recent summer day in Soings-en-Sologne, central France, winemaker Henry Marionnet recalled the words of the expert who authenticated the plot's age a decade ago: "You are in the presence of an eternal vine." The rare Loire varietal was introduced in 1519 under François I, and that this patch survived the phylloxera epidemic is as miraculous an anomaly as the nectar it produces. With blinding minerality and peach notes "it's a wine from another world," says Marionnet of his cuvée Provignage...
...bigwig; just relax and savor the insults. Every person, monument and company gets a derisive nickname. CNN is "the Cartoon News Network." Toby, Simon's curly-haired, cherub-faced aide, is variously addressed as "Fetus Boy," "Love Actually" and "Ron Weasley." (The last is an apt epithet; as the plot will show, Toby is more than a little weasely.) Chad, a tall, thin lad on the American team, is "Young Lankenstein" and "the boy from The Shining." James Gandolfini plays a dovish U.S. General here, not a Mafia don; still, it takes giant golden gonads to have the ex-Tony...