#aegypt

from Aegypt by John Crowley

First off, Crowley is a great namer, and he’s obviously having fun with it--that one-two punch of Rosie Mucho (two iambs trochees, btw) and the alliterative/consonant Rosalind Rasmussen (two dactyls), and Fellowes Craft. (The protagonist’s name is Pierce Moffet, and the town this takes place in is Blackbury Jambs, which borders on excessively twee but I’ll allow it).

In the car with her were her three-year-old daughter Sam, her two Australian sheepdogs, her natal chart in a brown manila envelope, a historical novel by Fellowes Kraft to be returned, and her husband's lunch, wrapped in plastic wrap

Once again characterization by list. These are in the context of the unnamed errands, which the book and the lunch suggest are related to (and the daycare has already been mentioned, so we can include the child among those), so that gives meaning to the enumerated objects. As I’ve said before, a challenge with lists is variety, and we get a spectrum of things. Ordering is also a source of meaning in lists, and here we seem to get a rough ordering by importance, which specifically does two interesting things: puts the husband’s lunch last, which ties in with the “soon to be again” at the beginning in suggesting conflict in the marriage, and puts the most intriguing item in the inconspicuous middle--the natal chart, the only item there whose corresponding errand is not stated or easily presumed, recalling the intriguingly vague single unpleasant errand that’s not really an errand and very gently ratcheting up the curiosity re: its nature.

A separate point: the mirror “cast[ing] up... the brilliant August morning.” The mirror itself fits with the general structure of enumerating objects in the car connected to Rosie’s errands. In this way, Crowley conveys what the weather is like within the structure of ideas that he has created for this paragraph. It’s an example of how good writing comes of compression and integration--when you want to include an incidental detail, find a way to fit it into the ordering principle of the passage.