In "New Bedlam," however, the tendencies toward endless passages explaining industry minutiae and gratuitously editorializing dialogue that merely winged Flanagan's first novel here prove lethal.
As a general rule, heavy breathing is unnecessary, and even counterproductive, when a writer's subject is atrocity, and much of Goldhagen's book is a compilation of atrociousness: seemingly endless passages recount the awful things said about Jews over the past several years.
It's like one of those video games in which you wander down endless passages, except there are no aliens or demons to kill -- although the console operator, Chris Fields, tells me that when they get bored, they occasionally use the hook to squash roaches.
In addition to endless passages chronicling their time together, the book is also peppered with anecdotes about "old Hollywood", which cinemaphiles and devotees to pop culture will surely appreciate.
The strings play those endless tremolo passages and loud pizzicatos with unrivaled intensity and force.
Endless narrative passages are only good if they involve passionate sex.
The couple's endless wrangling over passages marked the first disharmony in this memorably disharmonious union.
During that time, we were at the receiving end of a feast of quite incompatible ingredients: endless pauses; long passages of improvisation (some meaningful, some not); flashes of blazing brilliance and long stretches of the bored, colourless delivery of someone just going through the motions.
It is one of the commonplaces of Anglo-American relations that while we are conscious of the passage of endless centuries, they have no sense of history.
The movie is a Euro pajama party, an awkward rite of passage involving endless misunderstandings and quarrels, but the mix of nationalities may be more novel to the French than it is to Americans, who take an ethnic jumble for granted.
