The austere steeliness on You Used to Be a Man, with its cold drums and icy synths grinding oddly against a human narrative of dashed hopes and fallen idols, sounds like disco beamed from the future.
Veber doesn't wrap up the movie so much as bring it juddering to an emergency stop, as if his dashing narrative haste had, for once, threatened to slide out of control.
Each one makes the listener complicit in an unexpected narrative twist: a dashing lover dies ("Playboys die young, this one did too / all worn out making dreams come true"); a young woman sleeps around ("When I stray / away from where I've got to be / someone always takes me home"); a day drinker commits murder ("They're hangin' me tomorrow / in the middle of my thirst").
With smooth, clear prose, carefully interwoven narratives, and a dash of comedic flavor, Straub brings the Post family vacation, and all the drama therein, vividly to life.
Stars are perfect narrative characters, ready-made dashing and lovely leads.
His narrative structure is intellectually dashing and reading it is an endlessly pleasurable navigation.
If you didn't know the novel at all, the seemingly reckless dash of the narrative, the dislocation of characters and ideas, will have left you feeling marooned in some grand farce.
Most reality television observes a familiar narrative arc – initial high hopes, dashed by disaster and resistance, rescued by a moment of high-conflict catharsis, followed by a degree of redemption.
It's a bright, shiny show, dashing cheerfully from videogame narrative to audience involvement to greatest hits.
Shaye Areheart, $23. Naqvi's smart and sorrowful debut is at once immigrant narrative, bildungsroman and New York City novel, with a dash of the picaresque.
