Taking a pause to consider what it means that Lydia and Luca are so middle-class, sheltered, and literary (she owned a bookstore and her husband was a journalist before being killed at the start of the novel). Everything is new to her, everyone has to explain everything, and ...
The influence of screenwriting is everywhere in mass-market fiction today. And screenwriting aims to translate action and images into bare-bones prose. Even an incoherent plot still puts butts in seats, as long as the action is thrilling, and the screen full of eye-candy.
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When an audience is used to this sort of storytelling, it accepts the manifold and glaring literary offenses of a Dan Brown with a mere shrug. Plots stolen from notorious plot thieves (often with the previous owners' names still affixed), and painfully hackneyed characters? Yawn.
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It is, alas, just as Edmund Burke informed us, in his celebrated essay ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL: "Custom reconciles us to everything."
End of conversation
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