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Rebecca Was An Academic Star. Her New Book Was On The Phenomenon Of Word Casings, A Term She'd Invented For Words That No Longer Had Meaning Outside Quotation Marks. English Was Full Of These Empty Words--"friend" And "real" And "story" And "change"--words That Had Been Shucked Of Their Meanings And Reduced To Husks. Some, Like "identity" And "search" And "cloud," Had Clearly Been Drained Of Life By Their Web Usage. With Others, The Reasons Were More Complex; How Had "american" Become An Ironic Term? How Had "democracy" Come To Be Used In An Arch, Mocking Way?

Redemption, Transformation--god How She Wanted These Things. Every Day, Every Minute. Didn't Everyone?

When The Clock Stops On A Life, All Things Emanating From It Become Precious, Finite, And Cordoned Off For Preservation. Each Aspect Of The Dead Person Is Removed From The Flux Of The Everyday, Which, Of Course, Is Where We Miss Him Most. The Quarantine Around Death Makes It Feel Unlucky And Wrong--a Freakish Incursion--and The Dead, Thus Quarantined, Come To Seem More Dead Than They Already Are.... Borrowing From The Dead Is A Way Of Keeping Them Engaged In Life's Daily Transactions--in Other Words, Alive.

I Felt More Doubtful Than Usual With 'goon Squad,' Because I Knew That The Book's Genre Wasn't Easily Named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - And I Worried That Its Lack Of A Clear Category Would Count Against It. My Hopes For It Were Pretty Modest.

It's Turning Out To Be A Bad Day, A Day When The Sun Feels Like Teeth.