But he writes a mean plot, full of crises that ingeniously spoof the melodramatic events of the original potboiler saga.

Even as it portrays inherently melodramatic events, it maintains an air of instructional temperance.

As in those books, improbable characters and melodramatic events proliferate to underscore the absurdities of recent history.

In the course of all these melodramatic events, Hillela remains curiously opaque - as though glimpsed through an oversized but badly focused telephoto lens.

Such melodramatic events are chronicled in precise, elegant prose that throws them into stark relief.

Ms. Oates makes no effort to ground these absurdly melodramatic events in a plausible psychological matrix.

These tales, set in the desert Southwest, revolve around ordinary people staidly facing melodramatic events yet aching for a way to break free of their natural reticence.

Even the many melodramatic events in August's story are related in a polite, uninflected manner.

With a stiff prose style and long rhetorical passages punctuated by melodramatic events, Griggs' novels are not models of "literary" styling.

Similarly melodramatic events proliferate throughout "False Gods."