Dubai Glitz to Hardware Retail

Plots are as much subject to the vagaries of fashion and taste as anything else. Some seem to have a definite shelf life (if you are working furiously on a novel about a Parisian time traveller’s wife you should probably stop; that ship has sailed) and others disappear because they cease to be plausible (it is sobering, for example, to contemplate how much of Shakespeare turns on questions that can be easily dispensed with by DNA testing). On the other hand, there are plots that have been with us always and are with us still, those that manage to capture something essential about the human condition. Those having to do with growing up or falling in love, or the birth and the death of our children or our parents. And, of course, there is the old story about an old man, alone, at the end of his life, enraged and not willing to make the graceful, silent exit that the young seem to think would be appropriate. “An aged man is but a paltry thing,” writes...