Word: plotting
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...setting is convincing and not obtrusive--always a danger in writing of "far lands and strange peoples." The plot tends toward the melodramatic, with a correct and fatuous happy ending--very satisfactory from the perfectionist point of view. One perceives in the first forty pages that dirty work is afoot; the dirty work is done; it is straightened out, and if, with the aid of a map inside the cover, one untangles the maze of proper names, one can comprehend and appreciate the situations in the sugar intrigue...
...plot, however, with its complications and solutions, is really rather incidental, for the book is essentially a book of character studies, and therein lies its chief virtue. It is mainly concerned with the interplay of the emotions and desires and actions of a group of people in a given setting, complicated by the influences and forces that their foreign environment brings to bear on them. Mr. Cozzens uses Cuba much as Kipling used Simla. And as in Kipling, the writing is character portraiture, rather than development. Consequently the people are painted in rather brighter colors than strict realism allows, with...
Cock Pit, however, is really a lateral book. It deals with a cross section of society, with the relations of individuals in that cross section. Mr. Cozzens pretends that this is not so--he furnishes a plot, and a rather melodramatic plot--but it, is really unessential. The longitudinal, progressive element in the book is insignificant, and the plot loses its claim to conviction in the happy ending, when Don Miguel, the omnipotent and implacable dictator, presents the heroine with some of Queen Isabella's jewels, in admiration of the really remarkable way in which she has thwarted his best...
...requires a naive temperament to follow without impatience the "Hinge of Heaven" plot progress. The girl Sally is supposedly a businesslike per- son but she insists on several hundred pages of futile wing-fluttering before her cheek is "mashed gorgeously" on Richard Clarke's waistcoat buttons. Whatever suspense exists, the reviewer did not discover...
...because of its uncompromising frankness and defiance of the literary code of ethics. If someone questions the ethical importance of the modern novel, the least any reader can say is that Mr. Washburn displays a diabolical clever less in the thin veneer of coarseness he spreads over his famous plot...