40 is the new 26

So the New York Times announced The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 list. Do we really need an article about an article? Why not just wait for the magazine to print the freaking list? Usually, this kind of hijinks is saved for the hard-hitting venues, like Access Hollywood's exclusive "Inside People's 50 Most Beautiful People List." But anyway, since it's obviously not a secret anymore, here are the picks for the top 20 young go-getters of fiction:

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 32
  
• Chris Adrian, 39
  
• Daniel Alarcón, 33
  
• David Bezmozgis, 37
  
• Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, 38
  
• Joshua Ferris, 35
  
• Jonathan Safran Foer, 33
  
• Nell Freudenberger, 35
  
• Rivka Galchen, 34
  
• Nicole Krauss, 35
  
• Yiyun Li, 37
  
• Dinaw Mengestu, 31
  
• Philipp Meyer, 36
  
• C. E. Morgan, 33
  
• Téa Obreht, 24
  
• Z Z Packer, 37
  
• Karen Russell, 28
  
• Salvatore Scibona, 35
  
• Gary Shteyngart, 37
  
• Wells Tower, 37

Of the 20, I've only read one extensively (Joshua Ferris). So I can't really get excited one way or another about the actual inclusions. But I find their ages very interesting. Only two of them are younger than I am. This means there's still time to produce that great work of fiction I haven't managed to produce in almost 30 years. Nice! See ya, Orson Welles watermark.

BEA postgame

Book Expo America (BEA) this year was kind of a weird affair. Book publishing has been in death throes for a while now (if you listen to all the Chicken Little articles, anyway), but apparently books are still being signed, created, and publicized--go figure. But the times, they are a-changin' regardless. Instead of the usual four-day book bacchanalia, this year's expo was condensed to two midweek days at the Javits Center here in NYC--and one floor of the convention center. Lean times or late reservation paperwork? You decide.

There were still the usual elegant booths for the big publishers, homey little ones for the smaller ones, and freebies galore. I scored, in no particular order:

* a large purple umbrella
* a foam rubber gavel
* a massive tote bag (I felt slightly guilty about accepting it from a direct competitor, but it probably saved my poor shoulders, which can't schlep as much free stuff as they used to)
* several smaller tote bags, including a replacement for my beloved BookTV one from last year
* a candle advertising the latest James Patterson book
* a tree sapling
* a Steve Martin lunchbag
* lots of galleys

I was a little surprised at the overall selection of books coming out this fall. I didn't see much in the way of big-name memoirs. Even the event's headliner, Barbra Streisand, was there for her book on design. The high-profile stuff was mostly political-ish, like the upcoming Earth (The Book)--and The Promise, signed by Jonathan Alter, which was my personal highlight of the day. I'm still working on The Bridge, but am really looking forward to this one too. Sadly, I didn't manage to complete the Obama trifecta by getting a copy of The Manchurian President, the author of which was also at BEA. Shucks. (On a similar note, the Regnery booth just didn't seem as busy as many others. Fewer freebies than other companies? Not many birthers among the librarians, booksellers, and publishing people milling about?)

There was also a surprising number of books on growing/legalizing pot. Not so surprisingly, those booths (at least three different publishers by my count) were hopping.

All in all, it was a good day. Believe it or not, my main intent wasn't (just) free books, but rather research. I got some interesting info on digital products (the smaller companies really seem to be ahead of the curve on that), and met a good number of people. I also made a friend at one point when a guy walking by was excited about the James Patterson galley I had in my pile, and was genuinely touched when I offered it to him. Good book karma. (And justification for my indiscriminate galley-accepting policy at these events.)

Now I just have to read everything I got. Good thing I finally cleared out the pile from last year! (...she said, knowing that the best of intentions won't stop this vicious cycle from repeating itself in 2011.)

Better Know a Classic: The Great Gatsby

Every couple of years, I reread The Great Gatsby. It's my favorite book, but that's not really why I keep picking it up--I've had plenty of favorites over the years that I don't really turn back to, for fear that they won't hold up. (I've been avoiding the Memoirs of a Geisha reread for pretty much that reason.) But I know that Gatsby will. And it never disappoints--it's still as close to a perfect novel as I've ever read.

I didn't always feel that way. The first time I read it, in an "eh, it's a classic and I should do it" fit of self-improvement in high school, I wasn't enamored. But then it was taught in one of the craziest lit classes I ever took in college (American Lit with a certifiable professor), something clicked, and I fell in love. (That's kind of how I roll; it's always the second glance that gets me.) And each time I read it, I notice something different--a turn of phrase that sparkles, a subtlety of character, or some random little moment that never jumped out at me before.

I think the narrator, Nick Carraway, has benefited the most from these multiple looks. First I thought he was too reticent; then I thought he was using the Daisy-Gatsby drama to cover up his own latent crush on Gatsby; and eventually I just decided he was unreliable. But I don't think so anymore. Maybe it's because he's 30 and I'm pushing it as well, but now I think he just kind of patches things together as best he can, as the only sane person on Long Island. He's very efficient, that Nick. He keeps everything moving along at a good clip, hustling through back stories that would have been fifty pages of exposition in another author's book (cough*Faulkner*cough).

I also feel more lenient toward Daisy these days. She's still a jerk, don't get me wrong--having a voice "full of money" doesn't excuse pitting men against one another for sport, or mowing down your husband's mistress--but I don't think she's malicious. She's bored and unhappy and desperate, with childlike comprehension of consequences. And without actual stuff to do (how did people entertain themselves in 1925 when gin wasn't handy?), it's easier to see how and why she lets things get so far out of hand, so fast. There's also the fact that everyone's pretty much egging her on, something I never really noticed before. No one (even Nick, with his constant disapproval) really stops to say, "Hmm, maybe you shouldn't cheat on your husband with the rich guy with the crazy eyes."

And I think the part that amazes me most is how wall-to-wall good the writing is. Nearly every sentence is airtight and eloquent. There's no questionable extravagance in a book that's all about questionable extravagance. So this book is as much a triumph of editing (both Fitzgerald's and, presumably, Maxwell Perkins's) as it is of the writing. (And having dealt now with some...colorful authors myself as an editor, I appreciate the wrangling it must have taken to get Fitzgerald to turn in anything on time and in decent shape.)

All in all, very happy with the biennial visit to West Egg.

Some of my favorite parts, this round:

"The bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names."

"She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented 'place' that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand."

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

When the shortlist for this round of book club came up, I picked The Day of the Locust because it's been lauded as one of the best novels of the 20th century, and even had blurbs from author Nathanael West's contemporaries, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Malcolm Cowley. So I figured that with the lavish praise and the book's 1930s Hollywood setting, it would be somewhat Fitzgeraldesque.

Not so much. It's really more of a novella than a full novel, and an underdeveloped one at that. It's the story of Tod Hackett, an artist-cum-set-painter who moves to Los Angeles for the same reasons presumably everyone else did in the 30s: to trade the hardship and tedium of Depression-era America for something more exciting and glamorous. West's Hollywood is filled with people who have "come here to die," and Tod is fascinated by the quiet, insistent subclass that has popped up--the extras, crew members, and various hangers-on who fill out the movie industry. So between the actual scenery and the human scenery, Tod is kept pretty busy with an unofficial "artistic" study of it all. (He doesn't seem to notice or care that he's one of them as well.)

But of course there's a girl, too. He falls in lust with one of his neighbors, the beautiful movie extra Faye Greener, who wants to be an It Girl. But Faye doesn't seem to have much working for her on that front, except a vague idea that she needs to be a star, and a knack for making men act like idiots in her presence. She manages to hook Tod, a hapless Midwestern dude named Homer Simpson (seriously!), and a couple of cowboy types who basically stand around doing nothing until there's a movie that needs, well, cowboy types. Faye flirts, teases, and manipulates her way through the group of men, getting what she needs for herself and her aging showbiz father. And the guys all put up with it--paying for cuckolded dates, jockeying for her attention, buying her things. The only one who's close to a decent human being is Homer 'cause he's sweet and clueless, and even he's on the far end of the "acceptable" spectrum. And if there's any point that the book approaches Fitzgeraldism, it's in the fact that none of the characters are especially likeable--but here, there's no amazing prose to back that up, or an especially compelling plot.

The plot feels episodic and a little random. The only real common thread is violence: in the book there's a subtext-heavy cockfight, an actual fight among Faye's suitors, a fight with a little person, a fight with a child, forced sex...you name the brutality, it's in here somewhere. And for all of the emphasis on Tod's chronicling all of this for his art, you don't actually get to see much of that happen. And after a few carefully thematic scenes, including a riot at a movie premiere, West relies on very little else to convey meaning and relevance.

And I think it's a shame, because this novella could have been so much better as a standalone work if it had just been fleshed out, and not reliant on the ennui/inertia of the characters to get the major points made.

Oh, well--not the favorite book club book (on either of our parts, unless Jacob has had a major revelation since last night), but at least it was brief. On to the next one! And to The Great Gatsby, because I realized that I would have been much happier doing the semi-annual reread.

The Likeness by Tana French

A few weeks ago I read In the Woods by Tana French, an absorbing mystery set in Dublin. I enjoyed French's style, and was enthusiastic to read what came next.

The Likeness picks up, plot-wise, where its predecessor left off. But instead of following the same narrator, it focuses on Cassie Maddox, the (now former) partner of the previous protagonist, Rob Ryan. Basically, after the events of the last novel, Cassie is left completely burned out. She has ditched her primo Murder job to join the much less glamorous Domestic Violence squad, and struggles to get through the day-to-day mundanities, despite a supportive boyfriend (Sam, who's still a Murder detective) and a job with much less pressure.

But lest we think Cassie is going to be left to wallow for long, a murder victim turns up stabbed in a cottage in the Irish countryside. And theoretically it's not Cassie's problem anymore. But not only is the victim a dead ringer (ha!) for Cassie, the girl's papers identify her as "Lexie Madison"--the identity that Cassie herself invented for an undercover assignment that began and ended years ago. But identity theft aside, it's not every day that you get a victim who happens to look exactly like a local detective with undercover experience, I'm guessing. But once you get past that awfully convenient set-up, things get interesting fast.

Cassie's former mentor, a gung-ho type who's frothing at the mouth to investigate a murder from the inside out, has a plan: they'll tell the dead girl's friends that hey, false alarm, the stabbing wasn't fatal. Cassie will undergo a crash course in Lexie's daily life, mannerisms, and known associates. Cassie will become the dead girl, figure out how the chick ended up with the fake identity in the first place, and suss out who wanted her dead. Of course. Detective-on-the-case Sam doesn't want Cassie to take the risk of a) pretending to be someone who generates stabby ill will; or b) putting herself in the position of becoming Lexie Madison a second time--'cause what if the killer was someone holding a grudge against Cassie's iteration of Lexie, and not the impostor's? However, in the grand tradition of mild-mannered boyfriend characters everywhere, Sam's objections are quashed pretty quickly, and Cassie agrees to go undercover as Lexie.

The most difficult part of the transition is that Lexie had been living with a small,extremely close group of friends from her literature PhD program. Because there's a good chance that one of them is the killer, none of them can know what Cassie's up to. So, much of the novel is Cassie assimilating into this tight-knit group--no small task when the group (three guys and two girls) is so codependent that menstrual calendars aren't even secret. It involves a good bit of disbelief suspension, but it's interesting to watch Cassie straddle her duties as a cop with her devotion to melding into Lexie's life, and becoming caught up in the quirks and appealing (if odd) structure of Lexie's life with this crew. At the same time, Cassie needs to figure out how the girl ended up with the Lexie Madison identity at all. So it's one big ball of potential clusterfuck. Cassie knows it, and starts caring less. The reader knows it, and that's what keeps the tension going throughout.

As with In the Woods, what French lacks in plausibility, she makes up for with good characters and solid writing. Cassie makes a better (and much more reliable) narrator than Rob, and the sequel is both tighter overall, and structured better than the first. And I like the way French is creating her series: keeping the setting, the sensibility, and the periphery, while switching out the voices. Commercially, people like a protagonist they can get behind for ten books (and however many movies)--but literarily (is that a word?), it's much richer to create an arc this way. Although I definitely got attached to Cassie, I'm looking forward to the third book this summer, with yet another narrator.

Parts I liked:

"I don't tell people this, it's nobody's business, but the job is the nearest thing I've got to a religion. The detective's god is truth, and you don't get much higher or more ruthless than that. The sacrifice, at least in Murder and Undercover--and those were always the ones I wanted, why go chasing diluted versions when you could have the breathtaking full-on thing?--is anything or everything you've got, your time, your dreams, your marriage, your sanity, your life. Those are the coldest and most capricious gods of the lot, and if they accept you into their service they take not what you want to offer but what they choose."

"Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers. It's because they're held here so lightly: they haven't yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever. It changes the very fabric of you."

Shorts

Last week's New Yorker was one of the more satisfying ones in recent memory--and they've been on a good streak with the fiction as well.

I really liked E.L. Doctorow's piece Edgemont Drive. Short, simple, meditation on dispossession and suburban priorities.

And last week's story, Allegra Goodman's La Vita Nuova, was similarly punchy. I found this one poignant 'cause I identified with it more directly, but I think it's well-constructed. I'm a little leery of a story that begins with a woman getting dumped by a fiance, but it never veers into chick lit-ish self-pity. I'm not familiar with Ms. Goodman's work, but I'll probably check her out.

Underworld by Don DeLillo

So the latest book club book was Don DeLillo's Underworld. Jacob already has this covered, but I felt guilty not holding up my end of the book club. (Especially since I was the one who proposed this round's short list.) And this one is significant because he's our first repeat author, after we did White Noise a couple of years ago. Neither of us liked it much, but I'd tackled Americana by myself and enjoyed it considerably more. So Underworld, the canonical one, was the true test.

And the verdict is: meh. I think I'm getting burned out on ultra-post-whatever-modern writers. A girl needs a plot that hangs together once in a while, y'know? I don't want an epic that shows me everything you can do. I don't want clever conversation; I never want to work that hard; I want you just the waaaaay you are....Oops.

So yeah. I do like challenging books. But I'm willing to expend less and less patience on books that shuffle you around, tell you everything's brilliant, you'll see, it's coming, and then...fin. And DeLillo is really good at that--possibly the best. His writing is solid enough to keep you hooked in on the promise of a revelation that never actually comes. I get that this puts the focus on the characters and the mini-arcs he creates. But unless those come together in a cohesive way, it's more of an ambitious collection of short fiction than a single novel. And Underworld has too many moving pieces (few of which are linked in anything more than a perfunctory way) to be a satisfying whole.

The novel ostensibly follows Nick Shay, an Arizona waste management executive struggling in middle age with an unsatisfying marriage and a juvenile delinquent past he doesn't really want to think about. But DeLillo does, and so 80% of the book is spent trying to tie Nick's past with the American 20th century landscape. This includes baseball (of course), the atomic bomb, the New York art scene, and Cold War anxieties. As separate pieces of fiction, they work. I especially liked the middle section, following an artist, Klara Sax, who struggles with her identities as a wife/mother and an artist in the 50s. But DeLillo needs to connect it to the whole, so he has her seduce a young Nick, cougar-style, so that she's joined with the rest of the book. It seems like a waste of a strong female character, to have her only real use to the main narrative be a single sexual encounter.

And I really did enjoy the book's opening set piece, the 1951 Dodgers-Yankees pennant game, featuring an unexpected cast: a young Harlem kid who'd snuck into the game and manages to come away with the mythic homerun ball; Frank Sinatra; Jackie Gleason; and J. Edgar Hoover. It's interesting and extremely well-written. I just wish the rest of it could have been more cohesive in its grandness.

Savior of the week

Ever since Steve Jobs announced the much-rumored iPad in January, the publishing industry has been simultaneously having a collective orgasm at the possibility of a superior e-reader, and trying to figure out what the heck to do with this information.

In this week's New Yorker, Ken Auletta dissects the current state of book publishing, in one of the clearest and most candid pieces I've seen on the subject. What I found most interesting, though, is that much of the article veers from the ostensible subject (e-readers and their glorious potential), and turns into an episode of Everybody Hates Amazon. I'm on the fence about Amazon: professionally, I hate that they're creating a sales stranglehold from the WalMart playbook. But personally, they're the first place I turn when I want a discount on a hardcover bestseller, or don't feel like paying more than ten bucks for a paperback. And I like that they've all but obliterated the distinction between backlist and frontlist. So basically, accessibility good; monopoly bad.

But let's face it: my career is staked on the idea that not only are books necessary in the new Jobsian world order (in whatever format), they need someone to shepherd them along. And Amazon is helping to create an atmosphere where that shepherding is less necessary. The article brings that up directly, the idea that editors and author relationships are getting lost in the shuffle in favor of leaner self-publishing models for digital products. And it's something that's becoming a problem in traditional publishing as well: editorial input being quashed in favor of digital expertise. Is a developer going to take angry phone calls from an author who needs to be soothed? I doubt it.

Another interesting aspect of the piece is how the Big Six trade publishers (Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Penguin) and--to a lesser extent the smaller ones--are more or less uniting in this. No real holdouts, even though everyone's negotiating digital royalties, pricing structures, etc. on their own. But everyone seems to carry the new "we heart e-books" mantra like a badge. And all of them seem similarly frustrated by what needs to be implemented now to become truly content agnostic, and somehow stave off complete unprofitability in 5-7 years.

And at this point, Apple is the good son because there's no real plan to take over (like Amazon) or repurpose content (like Google), just push content out there. From the article: "'Ultimately, Apple is in the device—not the content—business,' the Apple insider said. 'Steve Jobs wants to make sure content people are his partner. Steve is in the I win/you win school. Jeff Bezos is in the I win/you lose school.'" So essentially, Google is the oldest kid who outgrew its rebellious phase; Amazon is the rage-filled middle child who hasn't been getting enough attention; and Apple is the favored youngest.

So we'll see, I guess, which company wins out in this codependent mess of a relationship. (Though I'm probably not putting my money down on the Kindle any time soon.)

Mean Girls, literary-style

Cady: And they have this book, this "burn book" where they write mean things about girls in our grade.
Janis: Well what does it say about me?
Cady: You're not in it.
Janis: Those bitches!

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I do love a good literary slap fight.

I was reading an article today (courtesy of JF) that authors should pay it forward with blurbs--meaning that if they've received the all-important jacket endorsements from other authors, then they should repay that by blurbing other writers as well. Somehow, I don't think this is the kind of thing that article writer had in mind:
The 50 Best Author Vs. Author Put-Downs of All Time.

It's basically a love letter to writer-on-writer violence. And it's funny, not least because a good percentage of them are taking potshots at people who died long before, and thus can't avenge themselves or hold grudges--in print or otherwise. It's the literary way. The sexist ones and the death-wishing ones are less entertaining, but all part of the same unfortunate bitchy package, I suppose.

Some of my favorites:

22. Gertrude Stein, according to Wyndham Lewis (1927)
"Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along."

23. Emile Zola, according to Anatole France (1911)
"His work is evil, and he is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it would be better had he never been born."

26. Marcel Proust, according to Evelyn Waugh (1948)
"I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective."

27. William Faulkner, according to Ernest Hemingway
"Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You're thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes -- and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he's had his first one."

Being an abstainer himself, Hemingway is clearly the authority on the evils of drinking. And some of them are just painful. Hemingway again:

39. James Jones, according to Ernest Hemingway (1951)
"To me he is an enormously skillful f#*&-up and his book will do great damage to our country. Probably I should re-read it again to give you a truer answer. But I do not have to eat an entire bowl of scabs to know they are scabs...I hope he kills himself...."

(Just...yeah.)

Anyway, it reminds me of one of my favorite Dorothy Parkerisms: "If you haven't got anything nice to say...come sit by me." Now good old Dotty, she could give an anti-blurb and a half. I'm a little surprised she didn't turn up here. Maybe they're saving that for Volume 3, 'cause goodness knows there's plenty more material where this came from.

In the Woods by Tana French

Having spent a fair bit of time lately reading books by writers more concerned with esoteric leaps of plot and logic than with with basic readability (looking at you, Underworld), I've come to appreciate stories that have a beginning, middle, and end. And they don't get much more beginning-middle-and-end-y than a mystery. So for that, I definitely appreciated Tana French's debut novel In the Woods.

In the Woods is the story of the investigation into the murder of Katy Devlin, a 12-year-old ballerina living in the Dublin suburbs. Her body is found on a controversial archeological site--and in the very same place where three neighborhood kids disappeared in 1984. Two of those kids were never found, but the third turned up the next day, covered in blood and so traumatized that he could never identify what had happened to him and his friends.

The primary detective on Katy Devlin's case just happens to be that third kid, grown up and one of Dublin's finest, under a changed name. Along with his partner, Cassie Maddox (with whom he has an intensely intimate but platonic relationship), Rob Ryan ends up with the case by virtue of being stuck in the squad room at the wrong time. Rob assures himself that it's okay that he works on Katy's murder because a) he's totally recovered emotionally (despite maintaining total amnesia of the event); and b) what if his unique insight can not only solve this new and tragic mystery, but the old cold case as well? The reader and Cassie are less sure that he's as sound as he says, but what choice is there but to go along?

The story is procedural but literary--the standard Law & Order stuff is balanced out by the device of being in Rob's head as he struggles to deal with new information, coax old information from his bruised subconscious, and come to terms with all of it while maintaining a professional veneer. The biggest problem with Rob as narrator and central figure is what he tells the reader early on: he's unreliable as hell. He lies, he equivocates, he skates around information you know he's hiding. He tells you he has no memory of his childhood, then produces oddly detailed and idealized scenes. You never really know whether he's going to have the necessary breakthrough in time, but you do know that he's going to break up on these rocks--it's inevitable. So this element keeps things interesting throughout the otherwise fairly straightforward murder investigation, though I think French relies a little too heavily on Rob's POV to bring about essential plot points.

Also interesting is Rob's relationship with Cassie. They have a stereotypically close partnership, these young cops who trust one another with their lives and share everything--except bodily fluids, which Rob works very hard to emphasize. He mentions the luckiness he feels at not falling prey to the curse of the straight man-straight woman sexual temptation, and spends a lot of time highlighting their jocular, familiar banter. But here, too, you get the feeling that he's very specifically not sharing information. It may seem like Harry and Sally, but an Ephron novel this is not, and so there are some major issues lying in wait.

While I enjoyed the overall writing and French's approach to the cliched detective genre, I was decidedly un-wowed by the ending. I'm not as furious about it as some of the Amazon reviewers, but I think it could have been handled with more resolution and less abrupt exposition. Not a dealbreaker, but not the best ending I've ever seen.

Parts I liked:

"Obviously, I have always wished I could remember what happened in that wood. The very few people who know about the whole Knocknaree thing invariably suggest, sooner or later, that I should try hypnotic regression, but for some reason I find the idea distasteful. I'm deeply suspicious of anything with a whiff of New Age about it--not becuase of the practices themselves...but because of the people who get involved, who always seem to be the kind who corner you at parties to explain how they discovered that they are survivors and they deserve to be happy. I worry that I might come out of hypnosis with a sugar-high glaze of self-satisfied enlightenment, like a seventeen-year-old who's just discovered Kerouac, and start proselytizing strangers in pubs."

"I am not good at noticing when I am happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern."