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comes to tragedy.”
    “How do you mean?”
    “I haven’t tried to put it into words before. I mean that if you take a lot of mealy little people who have already sort of sold their souls down the river before the book even starts, then you can’t really give a very large damn about what happens to them. The author can put them into perfectly frightful situations, and the poor little things can run back and forth, bleating like anything, but you sort of say so what.”
    “But isn’t it a tragedy to them?”
    “Hell’s bells, boy! Isn’t life itself a sort of experiment in tragedy? That sounds a little too good to be me. I must have read it some place. I’ve got a ragbag mind, full of snipped ends and bits. Tonight Mr. Walter Upshot and his wife Delicious Upshot and their three little Upshots are killed when their Super Rapier tries to uproot a hundred year old elm tree in West Armpit, Wisconsin. And that’s too damn bad, and I can feel empathy and a sort of remote grief for the Upshots. But it isn’t my kind of tragedy.”
    “What’s your kind?”
    “Before something can fall in a dramatic and glorious way, it has to be way the hell up in the air. There has to be a greatness and grandeur about it. And then it falls, and it’s a long time falling, and it makes a glorious and tragic noise when it hits bottom. Hamlet. Richard the Third. You see, life never let the little worms in this book get off the ground. Or the author didn’t.”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You look pretty dubious, old antagonist. Let’s cook up an argument here.”
    “Well, Cindy, it’s just that you sound pretty damn arrogant. As if you’re looking down on all us poor little worms. Suppose, and this is a hell of a poor example to use, I guess, but just suppose that Bernie should find that Joan has got something … malignant and incurable. Your way of thinking makes it impossible for me, under those circumstances, to experience legitimate tragedy. You leave me with just a sort of sniveling grief. Because I’m one of the little guys. Whoever authored me never let me get off the ground.”
    “Well, that
does
require an answer, lad. I better take it in segments. First off, I am not being arrogant and patronizing. I don’t think my soul is so grand and its texture so fine that I can participate in any grand tragedy.”
    “And I can’t either, then.”
    “Don’t jump so fast. Give a girl breathing room. I have been talking about classic literature. Not about life.”
    “Shouldn’t they be the same?”
    “Not in the dramatic sense. Look, you are a good man, Carl. There aren’t too many around who have that quality of gentleness and goodness that you have. Take your mind and add selfishness and arrogance and a quality of greed and you could have been a very powerful man. But that doesn’t alter the fact that there are a lot of good men in the world and a lot of good women who have had to hear the kind of sorry news that you used as an example. Illness is a condition of living. You can’t make dramatic material for the novelist out of a statistic.”
    He drank from the bottle and put it down. “Okay. Statistic. I guess a lot of ambitious young men have killed young women who stood in their way. Rather ordinary young men. Selfish and greedy. So a guy like Dreiser makes a novel of it that not only stands up, but I would consider a legitimate tragedy, even though the fallen could not be considered grand and mighty.”
    “Hmmm,” she said. “That rocks my little boat, but I don’t quite founder. Take good old Crescent Ridge, this sterling experiment in planned community living. Make me a tragedy in this locale, sir. I mean a dramatic tragedy. Take that Crosby thing over on Shattuck Road last year. She was sleeping around and he was the traditional last to know, and when he found out, he cut his wrists but they found him in time and now they’re divorced. But you know and I know that her pseudo-nymphomania was based on alcohol,