Word: taut
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...COMMONEST of misconceptions about Arthur Hailey's books is that if not great literature, they must at least be superbly crafted--taut, gripping, smoothly written, and so forth. The fact is that's simply not it at all. Hailey's books are rather clumsily put together, all in exactly the same way, and while he could never be accused of overwriting his sentences are still graceless, his dialogue wooden, his characters two-dimensional. And his latest book, The Moneychangers, which came out in paperback last month, is a great deal like all his other books. It is about an American...
...Taut and slender in black hiphuggers, Arthur Mitchell surveys rehearsals through rose-tinted rimless glasses. There is nothing rose-colored about his attitude, however. "Allen, you should be horsewhipped. We've done this step a thousand times. Virginia, you are dreaming. Establish what you want-you are the lead." To a male dancer in mid-pirouette, he shouts: "What's this, greasing your hair? I'm not having that grease onstage...
...into well-plotted and elegant short stories. If, as Norman Mailer (another Nobel-chaser) once wrote, the real short story writer is a jeweler, then O'Hara's best short fiction has the brilliance of carefully polished jewelry. O'Hara's later short story style depends on a clean, taut prose that unobtrusively serves to carry his plot and dialogue to conclusion. And as he grew older, despite his commercial success, O'Hara became more and more concerned with his place in American literature (donating numerous manuscripts to Harvard, Yale and Penn State). His writing often reflected this preoccupation...
...creativity with maleness. "The soul selects her own society, then shuts the door," begins one of Emily Dickinson's best-known poems. Dickinson's poetry reflects her unique physical, as well as spiritual, confinement; a life-long recluse, she shut herself up in her father's house and composed taut verses proclaiming the isolation of the human soul...
...better of the Oswald-Nixon-Sirhan Sirhan-Hunt-Walt Disney-Did-It genre, Three Days of the Condor, now showing at the Circle Theater in Brookline, makes the trip over the Charles to Cleveland Circle worthwhile. Robert Redford battles the mailman, Faye Dunaway, paranoid and the CIA in a taut and suspenseful film. By the end, it's tough to figure out whom to trust, except the Sundance...