There Is A Difference, Of Course, Between

And Then There Were The Wallflowers Who Had Recognized For Years That The Thing Was Hopeless, Who Had Found In That Information A Kind Of Calm. They No Longer Tried, With A Bright And Desperate Effort, To Sustain A Conversation With Somebody's Brother, Somebody's Usher, Somebody's Roommate, Somebody's Roommate's Usher's Brother... The Category Of Wallflower Who Had Given Up On All This Was Very Quiet, Not Indifferent, Only Quiet. And She Always Brought A Book.

Hardly Anyone About Whom I Deeply Care At All Resembles Anyone Else I Have Ever Met, Or Heard Of, Or Read About In Literature.

I Love The Laconic. Clearly, I Am Not Of Their Number.

People Have Been Modeling Their Lives After Films For Years, But The Medium Is Somehow Unsuited To Moral Lessons, Cautionary Tales Or Polemics Of Any Kind.

The Writer Has A Grudge Against Society, Which He Documents With Accounts Of Unsatisfying Sex, Unrealized Ambition, Unmitigated Loneliness, And A Sense Of Local And Global Distress. The Square, Overpopulation, The Bourgeois, The Bomb And The Cocktail Party Are Variously Identified As Sources Of The Grudge. There Follows A Little Obscenity Here, A Dash Of Philosophy There, Considerable Whining Overall, And A Modern Satirical Novel Is Born.