These books are, admittedly, not totally devoid of overblown love-swept monologues and endless accounts of rural scenery, but they are certainly not "wishy-washy", either.
The only criticism made of his finest novel now is what some critics said 50 years ago - that the rhetoric is sometimes overblown, that his love for the Joads verges on sentimentality, and that the ending is too melodramatic.
Gloriously overblown, Give Me Your Love was the physical act played as highest drama, sultry and magnificent.
From the former, he gained a love of overblown rhetoric; from the latter, he learned how to use intimidation as a management style.
He regularly warns American firms eyeing the British market that overblown promises of true love are likely to repel rather than attract.Mr Brooks also thinks online giants are missing a trick that the underground pick-up industry learned long ago.
While the decor has been refreshed and toned down a little in recent years (a shame – I loved the overblown Mills & Boon-cover style of yore), it's still something of a dark, split-cane furniture time warp.
Do cheesy freebies really inspire me to pepper my articles about compelling, crowd-pleasing documentaries like "Finding Bigfoot" or make-you-stand-up-and-cheer programming blocs like Shark Week with the overblown adjectives that press agents love to pluck for ad campaigns?
Baldly formulaic and emotionally tone-deaf, Gifford trots out every cliché in the book — drug addiction, mother issues, an ultimately banal love triangle, an overblown courtroom scene, a sassy black friend, among others — to tell what could have been a unique parable of faith and vanity.
Although Cradeau is not attracted at first — Estelle's demand for love is as overblown as his refusal of it was in life — he's fascinated by Inez's rather predictable reaction to Estelle's artificial attempts to charm, by the way that a toss of Estelle's head or her come-hither look can make Inez shriek with hatred or desire.
