quoting

from page 128-129:

This is the kind of question Henry liked to put to himself when he was a schoolboy: what are the chances of this particular fish, from that shoal, off that continental shelf ending up in the pages, no, on this page of this copy of the Daily Mirror? Something just short of infinity to one. Similarly, the grains of sand on a beach, arranged just so. The random ordering of the world, the unimaginable odds against any particular condition, still please him. Even as a child, and especially after Aberfan, he never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.

yes! this is a ruminative novel. i do admire that. i am reminded of what i like about philip roth. i enjoy following the trains of thought, the weaving of the narrative with both the character's history and the history of the world. i enjoy the rhetoric.

perhaps at the heart of my personal literary impotence is the fear that i have nothing to say.