Actresses in pools, agents on cellphones, the agony of auditions, the pain of waiting for callbacks — these and other staples of Hollywood fiction are often rendered new by Birdie's sensitivity to apocalyptic signs and by Hollowell's jittery present-tense style.
"There are resolutions she needs to make, she thinks, steps that must be taken so that she becomes a very different sort of person," Ms. Sittenfeld writes, in a flat present-tense style meant to replicate intimacy.
While Cajun music's stronghold is around Lafayette, about 130 miles west of New Orleans, its two-step beat and high, tense vocal style have made their way into American music like country and New Orleans rhythm and blues.
Northern ballad-singing is syllabic, with a strict tempo and intelligible lyrics, while southern styles use a rubato tempo, and a strained, tense vocal style.
Throughout the novel, she experiments with perspective, grammatical tense and style.
El diablo cojuelo is an extraordinarily difficult book, abounding in complicated wordplay and written in a tense, equivocal style.
Paul Greengrass has a habit of directing historical films in a highly effective, tense documentary style while making striking, though disparate, political points.
Working as an investigator, I was riding the train each day from San Juan Capistrano to downtown L.A. I was writing on my laptop in the traditional third person, past tense narrative style.
These procedures, together with Mahler's own tense and rhetorical style, phenomenally vivid orchestration, and ironic use of popular-style music, resulted in three symphonies of unprecedentedly wide contrasts but unified by his unmistakable creative personality and his firm command of symphonic structure.
