His life often feels like a language-rich, character-driven literary story not to be plowed through for some larger meaning at the end so much as to be experienced as he reads it, or as it is reading him.

Even if nothing seems to happen in this particular story or, more correctly, even if this happening is incidental to the characters with whom he daily interacts, the dialogue is clever and spot on, no matter that most of the time he does not talk like this, quite as lucidly.

On the other hand, the genre can shift, and often does, without apparent reason or warning. He wakes from a dream and enters a world not of his own making. On these days, stunned into his skin, his life is a mystery of a formulaic sort. There are clues that appear to him—from the periphery, even, from the liner notes—trembling with authority and meaning.

Usually late at night, his life can feel like a short scene from a movie with notes for camera shots. He is walking up Broadway after hours, for one instance, towards North Beach, San Francisco. He is eating gelato from a plastic cup with a miniature plastic spoon as the men call to him to have a look inside, pointing to their darkened doorways.

On other days, still, his life is more of an overpriced academic title written not to be read, per se, but as a means to get tenure at some university post for which he sees himself years removed sitting in his office surrounded by books—all of them university titles. He is wearing a wool sweater with elbow patches. The sweater has been washed and dried and is thus a bit short in the sleeves. He picks up his phone to call the dean when he glances out on a deciduous tree beyond his window still holding—twitching with—one reluctant, tenuous leaf. “Fall,” he says, he whispers to it. “Fall,” he pleads. But fall to what, and what might this ultimately mean?