There are indignities in Moyna's provisional life, but Desai grants her heroine comforts in compensation.
But the work has more emotional resonance, suggesting the disarray of a provisional life.
After six days of waiting to hear back from her daughter, Anne buys a ticket for a flight to Pittsburgh, only to discover — just as she had feared — that Miranda (known in her new, provisional life as Andy), has been missing for weeks.
All the pieces seemed to barely touch the carpeting, as if they, too, were somehow keenly aware of just how provisional the life is that they're furnishing.
The theme of the novel, for me, was the provisional nature of life, and above all of parental life.
But then everything was provisional in the life of a swallow.
Payne's performance has a provisional quality, like life itself, and a conversational ease, as if he is merely thinking out loud and wants us to join in the conversation.
Mr. Calver is not quite sure why anyone would want to watch his cheese, although he said it might have something to do with the frenetic and provisional nature of life today.
His was not the sort of whiggish, anecdotal approach by which senior scientists tend to ossify the progression from past obscurity to present clarity, but a deeper attempt to understand the twists and turns of theory and evidence, which ensure that even our present-day knowledge is provisional, and like life itself, historically constrained.
And like Conrad before him, together with this sense of the contingent, provisional nature of life, there is always the shadowy awareness that the human species is an animal with an immensely violent history, one that over a couple of million years of guile and brute force has struggled its way to a position of planetary dominance.
Within this shadowy context, so profound as to be immeasurable, Mr. Albee and Mr. Stoppard use bright, impeccably assembled dialogue to illuminate the provisional structures of daily life.
