A VERY slender idea weaves its way through Voyage, like a faint but pleasing tune.
But even if Tolins manages to spin out a slender idea for 100 minutes, what strikes me is the show's oddly split-level approach to Streisand: veneration of a showbiz goddess is combined with a cascade of bitchiness, largely channelled through Alex's boyfriend, attacking her on the grounds of her age, looks and alleged control-freakery.
In "The Angel's Game," as in his previous novel, "The Shadow of the Wind," he spins a fantastically elaborate plot from a slender, whimsical idea.
But Terrence Rafferty, in the Book Review, proclaimed the novel's pleasures "guilty ones," as Ruiz Zafón "spins a fantastically elaborate plot from a slender, whimsical idea," namely the notion that "a writer might, on a bad day, succumb to a sense of futility about the value of his calling, might begin to believe that the act of telling a story isn't just vain, but positively diabolical".
And his play is not a miniature or a slender and overdressed idea; it's a full-blown two-act drama with a cast of a dozen, a narrative that proceeds purposefully to a climax and characters who are at least arguably rounded.
The idea is that slender microcolumns between the "splay cracks" are more likely to bend and break than are microcolumns between adjacent wing cracks because they do not have two fixed ends; instead, the end stemming from the sliding interface is free.
As Ms. LaGamma writes in a slender catalog full of tantalizing ideas, "Osugbo members try to obliterate dualities and, in doing so, to attain the ultimate level of enlightened consciousness".
He's smart to keep his criminal mastermind offstage for 276 pages: this mysterious figure turns out to be "a slender, slightly stooped whipcord man" whose idea of a menacing line is "We meet again, Spade".
Shown in unflattering contrast to Linney's textured plotting, these slender exercises remain more tethered to ideas — fate in "Ten High" and belonging in "School Night" — than to people or stories.
They were assigned not to the relief of the yes pile, or the decisiveness of the no pile, but to the slender median of the maybe, with no idea how their application will be resolved, or even when.
But never be too quick to dismiss ideas, even those that are slender and seemingly obvious, because not everyone has them.
