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The artist had always been disposed to raillery, a French preference for mingling ironic touches with the most serious sentiments.

He was in fine fettle, he told me.

Roth can reframe his alter ego's quietism as negation

Roth laughed, wrote the exegesis himself, and fed it into the shredder

but my experience of working in an Engineering department, with its sense for pragmatic solutions, has made me chary of doomsday prophesies