Word: soaping
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...years ago, the mischievous British media tried to fan the flames of a feud between Indian authors Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth by reporting that Rushdie had dismissed Seth's epic 1993 best seller, A Suitable Boy, as nothing but a "soap opera." Seth denied that Rushdie had been snide, but it is a measure of Seth's extraordinary skill and versatility--his first novel, The Golden Gate, was a tale of San Francisco written entirely in elegant verse; A Suitable Boy was the opposite, a marvelous, sprawling, and gripping tale of Indian family life--that one wonders...
True to any soap opera worthy of the name, the reader does race ahead, eager to see how it will all come out. But this time around, Seth appears to have hit a flat note...
...Odyssey in the culture of the Civil War (with a flavor directly taken from the Taoist hermits of old China). It was replaced by another debut novel set, for nearly all its 428 pages, in the teahouses of Kyoto in the 1930s. Just as last year, during the Capitol soap opera, the American public showed itself wiser than its rulers, so in our free time, it's proving itself more discerning than those who would wish to take it to the cleaners...
...entirely new one. For 15 years now the 27-year-old singer has enjoyed a kind of second-tier, ESPN2 level of fame: he was a member of the teen group Menudo, he once co-starred in Les Miserables on Broadway, has appeared on the ABC soap General Hospital. The cultural wave Martin is riding--Latin pop--we must admit, is also not an entirely new phenomenon. Salsa, rumba, mambo and other Latin musical forms have made inroads on American pop music--Celia Cruz, Ruben Blades, Gloria Estefan, Ritchie Valens, Los Lobos, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Machito, Willie Colon, Tito Puente...
...Pressing the off button only switches the set to a low-power mode, during which advertising copy appears noiselessly on the screen." Or a network's "Seamlessness Initiative": the characters in each show connect to the characters on all the other shows, so that "the star of the afternoon soap opera The Naked and the Damned (formerly Trailer Park) would appear as a contestant on the game show Quacks like a Duck." Or, in one of the book's funniest running motifs, the transplantation of a pig liver into the female protagonist's father, a Hollywood hustler of exceptional charm...