Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town — Edition Insights

Diction: The Ordinary and the Odd

Doctorow's word choices consistently ground the fantastic in the concrete. When Alan climbs the roof, he sees "scummy puddles of meltwater and little pebbles and a slurry of decomposing leaves." The specificity—"slurry," "scummy"—anchors the scene. Later, the precognitive brother Bradley is described with clinical precision: he "emerged from the belly of their mother with bright brown eyes." The phrase "belly" rather than "womb" is deliberately plain, avoiding any mystical elevation.

Even the violent detail of the pigeons—"they hadn't been eaten, they'd been torn apart, like a label from a beer bottle absently shredded in the sunset"—uses a simile drawn from everyday life. The comparison to a beer bottle label is jarringly domestic, making the violence feel casual and unsettling. This diction refuses to sensationalize, forcing the reader to accept the strange as part of the characters' normal experience.

Dialogue: Sparse and Functional

Dialogue in the excerpt is minimal and task-oriented. Kurt says, "I saw something," and then explains the footprints with a series of short, declarative sentences: "There's a lot of leaves that have rotted down to mud up there, and there were a pair of little footprints in the mud." The speech is unadorned, almost reportorial. Alan's response is equally spare: "Be careful, it's all rotten up there," Kurt calls. Alan nods and says, "Sure, thank you."

This functional dialogue mirrors the characters' focus on practical action. Even when Kurt is shaken—"His hands were shaking"—his speech remains direct. The lack of emotional elaboration in the dialogue contrasts with the interiority of Alan's later thoughts, where he "pictured Davey sitting here on the synagogue's roof." The dialogue thus serves as a surface under which deeper currents of recognition and dread flow.

Description: The Body and the Built World

Doctorow's descriptive passages attend closely to physical sensation and mechanical detail. The antenna installation is rendered with technical accuracy: "environment-hardened milspec surplus boxes," "Bell Canada's Willowdale switching station dumpster," "wing nuts on the antenna mounting." This vocabulary of hardware and infrastructure gives the setting a documentary weight.

Bodily movement is described with similar precision. Kurt "slipped dangerously down the ladder, toe-tips flying over the rungs." Alan "sat down cross-legged before the footprints." The physicality of these actions—the precariousness of the climb, the deliberate stillness of sitting—creates a rhythm of tension and pause. The description of Bradley's infancy is also bodily: he "mimed crawling" and "totter[ed] toward the spot" for toilet training. The body is always present, always doing something specific.

Structure: Juxtaposition of the Familiar and the Fantastic

The excerpt's structure moves from a detailed, realistic scene (rooftop antenna installation) to a sudden intrusion of the uncanny (the footprints, the torn pigeons) and then to a matter-of-fact explanation of Bradley's precognition. This juxtaposition is not marked by any shift in tone; the prose remains steady throughout. The effect is that the fantastic is presented as simply another layer of reality.

The narrative also embeds the extraordinary within a framework of mundane problems: getting permission from the synagogue required "three meetings with the old rabbi" and help from the youth caucus. The bureaucratic hurdle of drilling through a roof is given as much weight as the discovery of supernatural footprints. This structural choice implies that the strange and the ordinary coexist without hierarchy, and that the novel's world is one where both require the same kind of patient attention.

Readers should attend to how Doctorow uses the physical world—antennas, roofs, caves, rivers—as a counterweight to the fantastic elements. The prose never abandons its commitment to the tangible, even when describing a brother who sees the future. This tension between the concrete and the inexplicable is the book's defining formal feature, and it rewards close attention to the way objects and bodies are described.

That rainy afternoon, I kept returning to how Doctorow’s rooftop antennas felt more solid than the cave-dwelling family, the mundane grounding the impossible. Later, the same tactility surfaced in The impossible invention — Inside the Classic, though its machinery hums differently—quieter, older. I just sat there, rain on the window, turning pages, noticing how invention and ancestor both whisper about homes we half-remember.