"But writing his book — at least after a certain point, years in, when, by shifting its focus from the son to the parents, he'd finally seemed to find the thing's pulse and the novel began to take shape of its own accord — had also been the greatest pleasure of his life. That a publisher was then willing to pay him for it, pay him generously, was nothing to complain about. He'd do it again for free, in a minute. Many of those late nights, when he'd paced his apartment, his mind roaming the world he'd painstakingly created and could finally inhabit, moving within it from character to character, feverishly distilling into words thoughts not his own but theirs, had been ecstasies of absorption and self-forgetfulness."