Word: plot
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...meets girl served for a half-century as sufficient plot for virtually every Broadway musical. Then came a couple of decades of boy meets exotic locale, boy meets social dilemma, boy meets religious destiny, and boy meets his literary creator -- not to mention similarly unromantic encounters among personified animals and steam engines. Even musicals that focused on love tended to be wistful and full of woe, as if passion must always be a snare and delusion or a doom-struck mistake...
Such is Chicago's plot. But this play is more accurately a series of vacuous show tunes set back-to-back, with only the sparsest of dialogue separating musical numbers. And while a few of the tunes are catchy ("Razzle-Dazzle" and "Cell Block Tango" are both amusing), most of the dialogue seems flat and humorless. One exchange between Roxie and her lawyer is particularly foolish. When Roxie tells Billy, "You treat me like some dumb common criminal," he replies, "You are some dumb common criminal." Couldn't book writers Ebb and Bob Fosse have done better than this...
...plot revolves around two young British academics who seem ill suited to adventure. Roland Mitchell does plodding research on the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash; Maud Bailey, a dedicated feminist, is interested in another 19th century poet, Christabel LaMotte. (Neither Ash nor LaMotte existed, but Byatt creates excerpts from their imaginary poems and journals that bring them vibrantly alive.) Roland stumbles across a tantalizing fragment of evidence that the respectably married Ash and the spinster LaMotte may have had an illicit affair; such an event, if proved, would set the scholarly world on its ear. Before long, he and Maud...
...stuffed with the brand names of expensive suits, shoes and wristwatches, endless spoofs of nightclubs and restaurants and rambling reviews of pop records. The litany of the trivial is intentional, though Ellis seems to be writing for people who take forever to get the point. Instead of a plot, there is a tapeworm narrative that makes it unnecessary to distinguish the beginning of the novel from...
...airborne snackoid served on your incoming flight to risk alcohol. But do you despair? Of course you do. Do you give up? Certainly, by reaching into your flight bag and withdrawing one of this season's airport novels. You know the kind. Literary wide-bodies with plenty of plot that allow you to leave the real world in the first half paragraph and stay away through several flight-delay announcements. No-qual prose and cereal-box characters are customary, though an occasional lapse into good writing does no harm. The Odyssey and Moby Dick, both wide-bodies before their time...