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opposite: she started in heaven and made her way to hell.
    So, layers of allegorical allusions and metaphorical flights, but at the core of this book is the hard diamond of a passionate love affair.
    I’ll leave the love affair to your own thoughts and conclusions. What can more easily be talked about is the beauty of the language. Language is the crudest form of metaphor. It is a system of refined grunts in which, by common agreement, a sound we make—say “spinach”—is agreed to represent, to mean, that green leafy thing over there that’s good to eat. It makes communicating so much easier and effective, spares one constantly having to point at with bug eyes. I can just see a group of cave people fiercely bobbing their heads up and down and grunting and shouting for joy when they first came upon the idea. It was such a good idea that it spread quickly. What a thrill, involving a fair number of bruising fights, I imagine, it must have been to be the ones who were the first to look upon the world and map it over with words. Different groups of people agreed on different grunts, and that’s all right.
Vive la différence
.
    And so we have: spinach, épinards, espinacas, spinaci, espinafre, spinat, spenat, pinaatti, szpinak, spenót,,, and we are the better for it. Because these utilitariangrunts unexpectedly became a world unto themselves, offering their own possibilities. We thought language would be a simple tool directly relaying the world to us. But, lo, we found that the tool has become its own world, still relaying the outer world but in a mediated way. Now there is the word and there is the world and the two are enthralled with each other, like two lovers.
    The lovers in the novel were arrested for trying to cross a state border—illicit love being a customs offence at the time—and the first pages of Part Four beautifully capture the coarseness with which the world sometimes greets love.
    I thought I’d quote some passages to show you what powerful stuff you have between your hands, but there are too many—I might as well quote the whole book—and to take them out of context somehow seems offensive.
    You remember how I recommended Gerasim to you, from
The Death of Ivan Ilych
. Well, in this book, we have Gerasim’s equally domestic but petty antithesis: Mr. Wurtle.
    Beware of Mr. Wurtle, Mr. Harper.
    I can’t resist quoting. On page 30:
    But the surety of my love is not dismayed by any eventuality which prudence or pity can conjure up, and in the end all that we can do is to sit at the table over which our hands cross, listening to tunes from the wurlitzer, with love huge and simple between us, and nothing more to be said.
    On page 44:
    When the Ford rattles up to the door, five minutes (five years) late, and he walks across the lawn under the pepper-trees, I stand behind the gauze curtains, unable to move to meet him, or tospeak, as I turn to liquid to invade his every orifice when he opens the door.
    Grandly romantic? Yes. Highly impractical? Absolutely. But as she asks one of the police officers who arrests her, on page 55:
    What do you live for then?
    I don’t go for that sort of thing, the officer said, I’m a family man, I belong to the Rotary Club.
    She might as well have been Jesus, and the officer surely wished later that he had been more like the humble Roman centurion of Capernaum.
    There is this paragraph, on page 65, after she has returned to her native Ottawa, banished there for her extraconjugal illegality:
    And over the fading wooden houses I sense the reminiscences of the pioneers’ passion, and the determination of early statesmen who were mild but individual and able to allude to Shakespeare while discussing politics under the elms.
    I wonder if she visited Laurier House.
    By Grand Central Station
is a masterly—or, better, mistressly—evocation of love. A life untouched by Elizabeth Smart’s kind of passion is a life not fully lived. About that, we can take her word.
    Who would