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with an intern; nevertheless, when he’d left his wife and moved in with Katherine, a couple of envious senior colleagues at Page and Turner had taken him aside to warn him against the explosive mixture of too many kinds of intimacy, and wheeled out stories of editors who had lost star writers, and novelists who had dried up or, worse, started to write mawkish and baggy prose.
    Katherine was not a star yet but she was full of promise, and everyone at Page and Turner hoped and expected to see her latest novel, Consequences , on the Elysian Short List. There wasn’t a line he hadn’t pondered and polished. He had boldly changed the chapter order and meticulously tightened the plot. It had been a real collaboration. He had watched some of the sentences form on her computer screen while he kissed her neck and ran his hands over her body, not sure whether he preferred to distract or inspire her. They lay in bed at weekends, Katherine writing the next chapter while he edited the one before. Being so close to her writing made Alan realize that Katherine’s enthralling sexuality was only part of a broader erotic relationship with experience. She wrote the sentences of someone who trails her fingers over the furniture she admires and inhales the scent of a melon before slicing it open, who touches what she can touch, but also expects the most abstruse ideas to turn into sensations as her imagination takes them in.
    He had only just made the Elysian deadline, hanging on to the typescript until the last moment in case there was something still to be done; two sentences turned into one, one sentence broken into two, the substitution of a slightly resistant adjective to engender a moment’s reflection, in short, the joys of editing, all carried out without forgetting the art that disguises art, giving the appearance of ease to the greatest difficulty and bringing clarity to tangled and obscure ideas. It had been a terrible wrench when he handed the typescript to his assistant to get it biked over to the Elysian people on that final afternoon, but he knew that the collaboration would continue. He would help Katherine to find exactly the right way to describe the novel in interviews and, if all went well, the right tone for her speech at the Elysian dinner.
    As his taxi turned into Gloucester Terrace, Alan spotted Didier Leroux and Sam Black, both looking rather crumpled, as if they had been drinking all night and hadn’t had time to go home and change. Sam was a novelist who Alan might one day tempt over to Page and Turner, if he could get him for a reasonable price. Didier, on the other hand, he dreaded seeing, not only because he was an ex-boyfriend of Katherine’s who didn’t seem to know when he was beaten, but also because he was always trying to get Alan to publish his books in England. His latest assault had been at a drinks party of Katherine’s when he’d been trying to peddle his new book, Qu’est-ce la Banalité? .
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Alan said sensibly, ‘but we can’t publish a book in England called What Is Banality? .’
    ‘Call it The Anatomy of Banality ,’ suggested Didier, following Alan into the kitchen. ‘This will appeal to Anglo-Saxon materialism, and also the echo with The Anatomy of Melancholy signals that it’s a serious work, no?’
    ‘Of all things that don’t need analysing,’ Alan began, but Didier interrupted him straight away.
    ‘Ah, non ! We think we know what is banality, but in reality there is something very radical in the concept. When Chateaubriand says, “Everybody looks at what I look at, but nobody sees what I see”, we have the tragic isolation of subjectivity, the heroic vision of Romanticism, and so on and so forth, but the radical moment of the banal is precisely the reversal of Chateaubriand. It announces: “Everybody looks at what I look at and everybody sees what I see”. Epistemologically, this is the pure communism! Communism has not been realized in the state of