The ninety nine and one rule. To wit: working in any genre or posture, it is most effective to be 99% realistic and one% off kilter. Like the snippets of mythology in the early Lost episodes or the slightly unhinged manner of Leland in Twin Peaks or the THING in never let me go or the stream of consciousness in Portrait or the antimodernism of Ok Computer (subtler than it seems).

The slight narrative of neighborhood 1 is enchanting and weird. It conveys sadness without saying “I’m sad.” The part about tunneling to her window and her climbing out the chimney—the whole song—gets to the pathos of adolescence and also the death that is adulthood—In an engaging, lyrical manner. The suburbs is such a precipitous tumble that it makes me wonder—like those hippie burnouts who thought Barth or Barthelme wrote Vineland for an acid casualty, absent Pynchon—whether Win Butler suffered a life changing head injury.