The narrative winds towards Stefánie's sudden lapse into dementia, a predicament quite brilliantly described by Faludi not as the usual "bleeding away of identity" but as the opposite, "an onrush of all that she had been, all that she had experienced, suffered, fled".
More often, he's distilling what's funny about a predicament into expressive nuggets of dismay or discomfort, like the infirm whine of that African Cessna, or the suppressed howl of those prey to the "uncontrollable oily discharge" that accompanies certain US slimming treatments.
"I have struggled intermittently with the elbow for about four years but it never really manifested itself into a dire predicament for me," he said.
Cautious mission managers had put tight constraints on the Spirit's movement to ensure that it did not drive itself into a deeper predicament.
Firemen who attended the scene were able to free him from the object successfully, but he did require on the spot medical treatment from paramedics The firemen then provided the the man, from Newport, South Wales, with "suitable advice" to avoid getting into a similar predicament again, the Mirror reports.
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A continued response could possibly lead to lasting change, or at least the elimination of a rape culture that blames the victim for putting herself (or himself) into a dangerous predicament.
But instead of spiraling deeper into this vortex of despair, a predicament so alarming to Johnson that he summoned Tannenbaum, Ryan and the coordinators for a meeting on Tuesday, the Jets have meaning again.
It is this want of resolution — of the will to believe that a movie, like a poem, can deliver a person or a predicament straight into our hands — that leads to a bummer like "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory".
