He compressed that sprawling magnum opus into 545 pages (plus notes and index), a "brief, relatively compact narrative," so it could be published "while the subject of this work, now a man past 80, is still alive and in a position to read it".
Inventively distilling the essence of its source stories, Dibb and co-writer Matt Charman (whose credits include Spielberg's forthcoming cold war thriller Bridge of Spies) interpose the Parisian exodus of the first novella, Storm in June, into the rural melodrama of the second, Dolce, to create a satisfyingly rounded yet neatly compact narrative.
The compact narrative proceeds in a series of connected sketches that feel at once breathless and unhurried; Sada is a master of controlled casualness mixed with weighty philosophical questions.
An exciting and compact narrative, it lacks too many of his strengths to count among his major works.
Often this results in compact narratives — on "The Boyfriends," one of the album's standouts, a guy meets a girl at a bar, accompanies her home, goes to bed with her, and is interrupted by the appearance of her young son ("I ain't like that," Vlautin's protagonist wails).
In sorting out this mass of material, analyzing its implications and reducing it to a compact and powerful narrative, he has performed an invaluable service.
Typically, the folk ballad tells a compact little story that begins eruptively at the moment when the narrative has turned decisively toward its catastrophe or resolution.
Mr. Malouf concentrates the capacious narrative into a compact and fluid psychological drama for Jane and the Rochester couple, with their housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax and the ward Adele on the fringes.
Pearl juggles too many narrative strands for a compact novel (compact relative to "Our Mutual Friend," at any rate); weaving them together forces him to resort to exposition at inopportune moments, throwing off the pace.
