I so loved Fowler’s BOOTH that I decided to immediately turn to the much more famous WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDES OURSELVES. It is full of fun snippets. As for her example, her landlord: “Ezra Metzger, a name of considerable poetry. Obviously, his parents had had hopes.” And when two people come to enquire about him:
They said he’d applied for a job in the CIA, which struck me as a terrible idea no matter how you looked at it, and I still gave him the best recommendation I could make up on the spot. “I’ve never seen the guy,” I said, “unless he wants to be seen.”
LOL. And all this for a super minor character. Or try this, on her childhood toy:
. . . Dexter Poindxter, my terry-cloth penguin (threadbare, ravaged by love – as who amongst us is not) . . .
I love that parenthesis. That said, I did not like this novel nearly so much as BOOTH. It has a twist that I don’t want to give away, so it is hard to tell you too much about it, but while jokey it is actually a novel about grief. And that I just found too much like hard work. It was a long journey through loss, and I wasn’t really ready for that.