В присутствии Джонатана моя жизнь съеживалась до каких-то смехотворных размеров, и я только и ждал, когда он наконец уедет в аэропорт, потому что в тот же миг нарушенный масштаб восстанавливался, и я снова мог ходить по улицам Кливленда, не чувствуя себя беженцем-неудачником.

Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.

I’m not this unusual,” she said. “It’s just my hair.”

She looked at Bobby and she looked at me, with an expression at once disdainful and imploring. She was forty, pregnant, and in love with two men at once. I think what she could not abide was the zaniness of her life. Like many of us, she had grown up expecting romance to bestow dignity and direction.

“Be brave,” I told her. Bobby and I stood before her, confused and homeless and lacking a plan, beset by an aching but chaotic love that refused to focus in the conventional way. Traffic roared behind us. A truck honked its hydraulic horn, a monstrous, oceanic sound. Clare shook her head, not in denial but in exasperation. Because she could think of nothing else to do, she began walking again, more slowly, toward the row of trees.

I suspect any serious reader has a first great book, just the way anybody has a first kiss.

You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book.

Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.