The Palm Beach Story

Preston Sturges’s stories are expert and clean constructions, turnt on drips of irony dribbled out far as they’ll go before they snap back into classical resolution of form: marriage and remarriage, sometimes three times over. But Sturges’s writing—a process that we might say touches story with style and translates the science of “motivation” into the language of desire—resides and thrives in the fugitive space of non-optimizable chaos.