Novelists don’t age as quickly as philosophers, who often face professional senility in their late twenties.

Its first twenty chapters are squalid, savage, and attritional – rather well suited, in fact, to modern tastes.

from the sequestered innocence of 1962,

her hair dyed an indecent red’),

He would then proceed to startle and goad the earnest and morose, briskly crushing their fashionable and half-baked preconceptions.

a thickening mist of drugs and boredom.

But this is only America, car-tool and lawn-sprinkler America, and Hum is Lo’s stepfather, and three times her age, and for two years he rapes her at least twice a day.

squalid, savage, and attritional – rather well suited, in fact, to modern tastes.

‘among the wrongs and relics of her seventy years’.