At almost one o’clock I entered the lobby of the building where I worked and turned toward the escalators, carrying a black Penguin paperback and a small white CVS bag, its receipt stapled over the top. The escalators rose toward the mezzanine, where my office was.
The opening lines of the novel situate the fundamentals of the story - that is, the kind of information one usually refers to when describing what happens in a book. Here is that information: a guy steps onto the escalator in the lobby of the office where he works and it carries up to the mezzanine level. And that’s what happens. Literally, in the sense of the actual action of the novel in the present tense sense of “what is happening while I am reading this.” Everything else is extraneous—thoughts inside his head during that little ride.
But I also had a strong counter-fascination for the system of home delivery, which managed to hold on for years into the age of the paper carton. It was my first glimpse of the social contract. A man opened our front door and left bottles of milk in the foyer, on credit, removing the previous empties—mutual trust!
This is an excellent example of the mechanics of composition at work in the way the novel works. In that opening sentence, the narrator mentions carrying that white bag from CVS. He doesn’t specifically delineate whether the bag is made of plastic or paper, though the fact it is stapled indicates the latter. Through the miracle of stream-of-consciousness interconnected but non-linear processing of the mind, Chapter Six will feature nostalgic trip back in time in the narrator’s mind to a youth where milk was still delivered by the milkman in glass bottles. A virtual essay on the transformation of home delivery from glass-centric to paper-centric ensues.
(I think that ad was for Prell—or was it Breck, or Alberto VO5?¹)
¹ And was it Prell concentrate or Head & Shoulders where the new unbreakable tube squirted from the showerer’s fingers (“Oops!”) over the glass shower stall, caught by the husband who studied it with wonderment? Manageability—the ro- mance of the notion would come back if I paused in the shampoo aisle for a minute: so Harold Geneenian a word to be murmured by models whose hair looked like Samantha’s on Bewitched.
This is a novel. But, yes, the little “1” up there at the end of the first quote and the beginning of the second quote indicates a footnote. Footnotes populate the novel, though not overwhelmingly so as in a David Foster Wallace effort. And the footnotes here are less of the academic quality than the information. Such as this one. The actual narrative quote is from Chapter 13 and it comes in the middle of a long digressive paragraph about connecting the history of civilization to the history of CVS pharmacies which is connected to nostalgic memories of shampoo commercials as a result of the breathtaking choice of products available for purchase. The style and tone of the footnotes tend not to be notably different from that of the narrative itself
