The Nullarbor plain lives up to its legend of unimaginable flatness.
Doctorow's great topic was, in Don DeLillo's words, "the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history".
"This theatre is corn," snapped McCarthy in 1958, by which she probably meant he attempted to decode plain lives and asked the kind of embarrassing 19th century-type questions modern highbrow writers were not supposed to ask.
In "Origins," Maalouf focuses mainly on his grandfather Botros, a schoolteacher who, having failed in business (he wanted to grow tobacco in the Bekaa plain), lives instead "between notebooks and inkwells"; and on his more successfully entrepreneurial great uncle Gebrayel (his grandfather's younger brother), who left Lebanon in late 1895 for the United States and three years later for Cuba.
On another plain lives the fullness of my belly while pregnant, the juiciness of my joy and the complexities of loss.
In the early 6th century BC, Anacharsis, a Scythian sage had combined plain living together with criticisms of Greek customs in a manner which would become standard among the Cynics.
I spoke about how as a father of three young girls, every night I went to bed worried about whether my children would be safe from violence at their school, when visiting a public shopping mall, or just plain living their lives.
Men ride horses, roam plains, live in trees, in caves, wipe the sleep out of their eyes.
Once a year, their sons leave the villages all together to graze cattle in the nearby plains, living outdoors for two months, dancing and practising wrestling (the traditional sport of Nuba people) in a collective experience called "Fariq".
The plain doughnuts live up to the description; 60 to 70 cents each.
