The final half of the book is marred by dull descriptions ("Victor had gained weight and grown in all directions) that lapse into sentimentality ("Norma smiled at him, and she looked like sunshine"), as well as stylistic tics in which fragments echo sentences.
The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has acknowledged that her 1987 book, "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys," closely echoed sentences from the works of three other authors.
Re "Historian Says Publisher Quickly Settled Copying Dispute" (news article, Jan . 23, about Doris Kearns Goodwin's acknowledgment that her book "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys" echoed sentences from the work of others: Ms. Goodwin was extremely gracious and helpful to me as I was doing research for "The Last Brother," my 1993 book about the arc of Edward M. Kennedy's life in the 1960's.
But by second act their world has exploded as so does ours as a thunderous barrage of words floods the now wide open stage as lovers come and go, echoing sentences just heard in a symphonic blend phrases that seep deep into the psyche.
"I stand corrected," she said, echoing the sentence he often said to her. "But let me ask you another thing.
Tremain has given him a prose that echoes the sentence patterns of the late 17th century, but only distantly, so that it never seems quaint: "Our amours are not of the tearing and clawing kind, but agreeably hot for all that and tolerably frequent".
In notepad type: You have just told it to echo three sentences.
"I no longer am alone in my struggle" she said, each sentence echoing back even stronger from the crowd in the call-and-response now made famous by the Occupy movement.
Type echo to make a sentence or line.
Mr. Buck's death sentence powerfully echoes this country's most lawless and discriminatory past, a past that includes a time when African-American men were lynched on suspicion of crimes that sent white men to jail for a year.
Short sharp sentences, echoing the static of the radios, make the first hundred pages very tiresome to read, as does the American idiom.
