And the performances are so incisive that they erase any hint that the characters might come laden with thematic significance.
"Fulham were so incisive and decisive when they had their chances and that was the difference," Holloway said.
I disagree: Oates's writing is so incisive, so beautifully revealing of what it means to "inhabit a free-fall world from which meaning has been drained", that it is difficult to open this book without crying.
There was that piece George Packer had in the New Yorker where she actually sat down with him for some time, and her remarks to him were so incisive, so wide-ranging, so impressive, talking about the economy and people left behind by today's economy, and what it was going to take to spread the gains more broadly.
It's so incisive and comprehensive that an annual would be redundant.
Malcolm is so effortlessly incisive a writer that any of her subjects is liable to feel cut, but she at least seems fascinated by the book's deep contradictions – and she does call it "extraordinary", although maybe not exactly in the laudatory sense of the word.
He's so smart, incisive, and considerate as well as being a fount of ideas.
And Mr. Black is so wryly funny and incisive about matters of major import that he doesn't need to pile on poor, pointless Kim Kardashian.
This is the exemplary Gauguin, the conceptual painter who decouples line from description and colour from nature, the sophisticated savage who ferries his art books to the jungle, whose line is so supple, strong and incisive, sometimes soothing, sometimes whipping his earthy forms into shape.
