“The story was one of many stories the husband had encountered in graduate school, where over the past fourteen years his dissertation topic had drifted—geographically, chronologically, thematically.”

The tricolon “geographically, chronologically, thematically,” set off by a dash, mimics through its cadence the drift it describes, each adverb widening the scope of Miles’s dispersal. The emphasis on “story” and “stories” hints at a man submerged in narrative yet unable to author his own. The passage establishes Miles’s primary internal conflict: a state of perpetual academic aimlessness that defines his character and symbolizes a broader Search for Meaning in the Modern World. The narrator’s dry, understated irony contrasts his lack of professional momentum with his wife’s clear success.

“The husband, in addition to finally finishing his dissertation, imagined himself a farmer, a gardener, a grower of apples and peaches, his practical knowledge of which involved the weekly farmers’ market in downtown Menlo Park, a tomato plant on their campus-housing balcony, and the beekeeping scenes in Anna Karenina.”

The rising tricolon of vocations—“a farmer, a gardener, a grower of apples and peaches”—is swiftly undercut by a second, deflating tricolon of “practical knowledge,” each item smaller and more absurd than the last, culminating in the literary allusion to Anna Karenina. The juxtaposition of agrarian fantasy with metropolitan reality establishes him as an idealistic outsider unprepared for country living. Like the fantastical notion of finishing his dissertation, becoming an idealistic, savvy farmer is a goal equally inaccessible to him, contrasted by the constraints of his reality.

“And so, for the first weeks of their arrival in New England, they […] [saw] the world through the eyes of rabbits, emerging from their warren to roam the dew-damp paths, the world rich with the scent of roots and cut grass, and strange and perhaps dangerous creatures lurking at every corner.”

The extended metaphor of the family as rabbits, reinforced by the burrow imagery of “warren,” casts them as small, timid creatures in an oversized landscape. Sensory imagery—the alliterative “dew-damp paths,” the olfactory “scent of roots and cut grass”—illustrates a pastoral fairy tale, while the ominous cadence of “strange and perhaps dangerous creatures lurking at every corner” tips the register into foreboding. The mixture of fascination and fear demonstrates how they have mythologized and romanticized the idea of rural life, which they consider to be otherworldly rather than simply unfamiliar yet still distinctly human.

“What exotic flavors! What strange delectations! Raised in the land of the unprocessed and organic, attending public schools that maintained their own gardens, never had the children tasted of the Slurpee, the Twinkie, or the Pepperoni Pizza Cracker.”

The anaphoric exclamations “What exotic flavors! What strange delectations!” parody the dramatic literature that Miles and his wife have studied, deploying poetic diction to elevate junk food to the status of foreign discovery. The definite articles before each product name (“the Slurpee, the Twinkie, or the Pepperoni Pizza Cracker”) treat brand items as capitalized wonders, and the syntactic inversion “never had the children tasted” gives the sentence an archaic, biblical lilt. This ironic tone satirizes the family’s urban, organic lifestyle and directly confronts the theme of The Romanticization of Rural Life, undermining the parents’ idealized vision of country living.

“This time the passage did not fail him, leading him at last to a forgotten civilization, whose medicines cured him, and who welcomed him among their own. And there he would have remained, his story a secret, had he not met a protégé, who’d recorded Jeremiah’s story in the Colloquies.”

Delivered through Hugh, the passage adopts the cadences of oral folklore, its subordinate clauses stacking in the manner of a folktale (“whose medicines cured him, and who welcomed him among their own”). The recursive framing—a story preserved because someone recorded a story—embodies the theme of storytelling’s self-perpetuating power. The reverence with which Hugh conveys this tale emphasizes the relevance of stories among this community, whether it be the exaggerated celebrity gossip he was previously exposing or fantastical stories about the center of the earth.

“He ate with them, right? If he really believed that they were Humbabas, wouldn’t he distrust them? And he didn’t run away—which would be the natural thing for someone to do if their parents had been replaced by evil simulacra. Or was it?”

The passage unfolds through rhetorical questions that mimic the halting logic of parents trying to reason their way into their child’s cosmology. The clinical vocabulary of “simulacra” collides with the mythic “Humbabas,” dramatizing the collision of academic and folkloric frameworks. In investigating his son’s serious belief of a story he told, Miles reinforces his years-long act of analyzing fairy tales and fiction, searching for deeper meaning or clarity in things that are inherently illogical or meant to be unresolved.

“And he explained that the world consisted of what he called Rat-Lines, invisible pathways […] funneling together in great rushing channels, a transnational interchange of murine highways that converged in rare, legendary routes called Super-Rat-Lines, used for millennia, their numbers ebbing and flowing in fabled cycles.”

The exterminator’s speech extensively uses hyperbole, its single long sentence spiraling outward with phrases that mimic the migratory currents it describes (“funneling,” “converged,” “ebbing and flowing”). The capitalized coinages “Rat-Lines” and “Super-Rat-Lines” offer a comedic sense of authority to their names, while the mock-scholarly “transnational interchange of murine highways” elevates vermin to geopolitics. The mythic register blurs the line between practical knowledge and local legend, demonstrating Finding Purpose and Community Through Storytelling.

“Kate had met Paloma through Miranda’s friend Farnaz, who, by a twist of fate, had been Kate’s chair Eleanor’s wife Vy’s roommate as an undergraduate, six nodes in the great web of female friendship, which Miles had come to understand held much of the world together.”

The relative-clause chain, with its cascading possessives (“Kate’s chair Eleanor’s wife Vy’s roommate”), syntactically enacts the “web” it names, each connection prompting another until the sentence itself becomes a network. The metaphor of the web—reinforced by the tally of “six nodes”—emphasizes the power of community and the opportunities that one creates, something Miles will learn about throughout the novel.

“In the novel, when mowers rinsed their scythe blades in the stream and drank the water, Miles could taste the flecks of grass and the rusty tang of the tin cups. Should he switch topics again? he wondered; the only scythes he knew from folktales were magic scythes, which scythed the fields by themselves.”

Sensory imagery emphasizes Miles’s immersion in an action that he’d only previously studied, as Tolstoy’s prose becomes physical rather than an object of analysis. This demonstrates his desire to find purpose outside of his graduate pursuits, which have left him feeling unfulfilled; here, Miles finds more profundity in physical work than in academic scholarship. However, his impulse to make his passion “valuable” through the external validation of a respectable dissertation still creeps in, as he wonders if he should intellectualize something that’s enjoyable purely because of its physicality.

“Part of it is blue, like sky, and there’s part of a leaf and a branch, and the corner of a bird’s wing, just a corner. Like someone just went and froze the world and cut it up in cubes and strewed them all about, so one part doesn’t necessarily fit with the other parts.”

A caller on The Miscellaneous Minute describes a mysterious found object with two chained similes—first the modest “like sky” and then the expansive “like someone just went and froze the world and cut it up in cubes.” The fragmentation imagery (“part of a leaf,” “the corner of a bird’s wing, just a corner”) captures the mood of overwhelming awe and confusion from the caller. The misfitting “part” conveys a world that feels slightly askew, an abnormality settled within an otherwise mundane environment, much like the normal countryside that the characters inhabit that nonetheless possess eccentric characters and unexplainable phenomena.

“The truth, said Miranda, who had, in fact, written about this in ‘Fated Parallel: The Dark History of 42°44’N’ in the International Journal of Conflict and Violence, was that the Southern Vermont/Northwestern Massachusetts border, though clearly defined on the map, was something quite different when you got into the forest, a problem that was compounded when one considered the number of properties that spanned the frontier.”

This clash between scholarly analysis and eccentric rural reality reveals hidden tensions beneath the town’s quaint exterior. However, though Miranda tries to intellectualize the inherently obscure and folktale-esque impulses of the townspeople, she still partakes in the culture of storytelling, frequently regaling Miles and Kate with local gossip and conflicts. Her excess of academic papers and nonfiction books on the subjects show how she seeks out the “truth” of these situations, seeking deeper meaning much how Miles has tried for years to understand the details of Russian literature through literary analysis rather than real experiences.

“‘Copy me!’ she shouted. In the dusk, her pink jacket fluttered. ‘Copy me!’ And he lifted his arms to match hers, and set them down to match hers, and pushed forward with his right leg when she pushed forward, and his left.”

After Miles struggles to learn to ski, he learns by mimicking Olive. The parallel syntax (the repetition of “copy me” and the structure of “lifted his arms to match hers, and set them down to match hers”) turns the sentence itself into an act of imitation. Against the imagery of dusk and a fluttering pink jacket, a role reversal unfolds: Miles finds that he can’t learn to do something he enjoys through intellectual effort but through physical participating and learning from others, in this case his child.

“The truth, said Bentley, was that he was Snowflake Bentley, or to put it in a slightly different way, he was the second Snowflake Bentley, having been possessed, shortly after his twenty-second birthday, by the first Snowflake Bentley’s ibbur.”

This sentence proceeds through corrective self-revision (“or to put it in a slightly different way”), a bureaucratic pedantry that comically domesticates the supernatural story that Miles is conveying. Repetition of the name “Snowflake Bentley” creates a muddled sentence that manufactures the same confusion that Miles is experiencing. The Kabbalistic term ibbur, dropped in casually, is a moment of learned code-switching that lends esoteric authority to the fantastical subject he’s learning about.

“Indeed, listen to any so-called educated person, take note of their words, […] and you will realize swiftly that the vast majority of humankind have no idea what they are talking about.”

Bentley’s comment directly addresses the plethora of characters in the story who interpret life through an academic lens, hoping to understand the complexities of reality through intellectual pursuits. The dismissive prefix in “so-called” inherently dismisses the validity of their education, as Bentley has come to understand that not all things in life can be rationalized, a concept that characters like Miles slowly come to understand throughout the novel.

“But as she spoke, he felt a kindling defiance, the very same defiance that has driven many a man and woman to reject the reasonable and rational […] Who was she to tell him, she with her beloved students, her hilarious friends, her charismatic colleagues, her functioning knees?”

Here, Miles considers why he’s joining the Wylkes Society, remarking that he would’ve decided against it if Kate had encouraged him to do so. He wants to assert his agency and independence, outside of the domestic sphere he’s been inhabiting while Kate focuses on her career. The fact that his resentful list devolves from aspects of her profession into “her functioning knees” implies how petty he’s aware he’s being, yet he craves the opportunity to do something of his own accord.

“I am nearing the end of my transcription of X’s manuscript. Still, I do not know what to make of it. I have begun to wonder if there is not some truth in it […] and if the entrance to Paradise lay not in the stars above, but at our feet.”

The passage’s antithesis—“not in the stars above, but at our feet”—inverts the traditional notion of heaven as existing above the clouds, journeying instead downward in the direction of the frequently referenced text Paradise Lost. This writer’s increasing belief in Wylkes’s work shows the allure of mystical narratives and unsubstantiated beliefs, one that appeals to a deeper desire for wonder and discoveries that make life feel less mundane.

“The truth was: Some of it. Not none of it, and not all of it. But this was true of all the members, really. Most, if he could see inside their hearts and minds, believed a man had gone inside a cave and seen something extraordinary.”

The passage’s double negation—“Not none of it, and not all of it”—acknowledges a middle territory that avoids confirming both the outlandish beliefs of the Wylkes Society members and the academic, “realistic” perspectives of people like Miles, Kate, and Miranda. The colon after “The truth was” promises revelation and delivers ambiguity, grounding the group’s fantastical quest in a relatable human desire for mystery. The statement acknowledges that most don’t claim to know the absolute truth about life, despite what they may claim.

“You know I’ve been hearing this all winter, all the obedience community is talking about it. Something strange is happening. It’s not normal. It’s like they know something that we don’t.”

Clipped, declarative sentences convey urgency, each one shorter than the last. The vague pronouns (“this,” “it,” “they”) leave the mystery deliberately unnamed, and the simile “like they know something that we don’t” alludes to a folkloric convention of animals being able to recognize peculiar or supernatural things that humans can’t. The radio show functions similarly to a Greek chorus, amplifying local anxieties into shared folklore.

“But what they found was hardly less astounding: on a far wall, beside another corridor, engraved into the marble…”

The passage relies on the trailing ellipsis to suspend the revelation at its climax and pass the imaginative work to the listener. The dragging sentence structure (“on a far wall, beside another corridor, engraved into the marble”) builds tension, purposefully withholding the truth. This develops the atmosphere of excitement and revelations that the Wylkes Society yearns for.

“So he took me thro’ a stable & thro’ a church 

& down into the church vault, at the end of which 

was a mill: thro’ the mill we went, and came to a 

cave; down the winding cavern we groped our tedi- 

-ous way, till a void boundless as a nether sky ap- 

-pear’d beneath us, & we held by the roots of trees 

and hung over this immensity…”

Miles reads this passage from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell at home and thinks afterward, “You, too, William?” (258). This intertextual allusion elevates Miles’s secretive hobby in the Wylkes Society, connecting it to a canonical artistic tradition of underworld quests and reinforcing metatextual references as a framework through which characters interpret the world. He reads this immediately before discovering the text to Kate from Bjorn that makes him believe she’s having an affair, presenting the concept of a literal descent as a metaphorical descent into a newer, darker place.

“There were no matches in his contacts. There was, however, an email, and he opened it. Innocence took another step toward Experience. It was from the Southern Vermont Ski League, and the phone number belonged to Bjorn.”

Short, factual sentences mimic the click-by-click process of Miles learning, based on the text and the revelation of its sender, that Kate is supposedly having an affair. Set between them, the sudden allegorical intrusion—“Innocence took another step toward Experience,” with its capitalized Blakean abstractions—reinforces Miles’s reliance on literature to shape his experiences. The tonal collision itself dramatizes the disillusionment, while the transition from “Innocence” to “Experience” expresses how Miles is undergoing a transformation in the face of these facts.

“Kate watched all of this, the gathered searchers, her eyes drifting from time to time to Miles, wonderingly. How had he pulled this ragtag group together? How did he know them?”

The repetition of “How” presses two rhetorical questions into a rhythm of astonishment, while the phrase “ragtag group” carries an affectionate dishevelment that suggests that meaningful connections can be found in unexpected places. Kate’s wonder shows how she has been equally ignorant of Miles’s interiority as he’s been of hers, and the reveal that he’s developed an eccentric but supportive community is a welcome surprise.

“For, as they traveled onward through the caves, there were moments when she couldn’t help but dream of lakes with liquid fire, hills torn and transported by subterranean winds, and legions of entranced angelic forms thick as autumnal leaves.”

The passage borrows Miltonic cadence, with its final image (“legions of entranced angelic forms thick as autumnal leaves”) being an allusion to Paradise Lost. The series of visions utilizes literary devices like metaphor and simile to convey the inherently inconceivable expansiveness of the ideology of the “hollow Earth.” Even the rational Kate is susceptible to the allure of myth, drawn to the idea of hidden wonders.