For three days we worked on the proofs of his novel. He read aloud, I wielded the pencil. I was once again impressed and moved by the book’s sweep, its intricacy, its flow of ideas. And also surprised by the way his imagination seems to dwell forever in the 1950s. His efforts to get inside a woman’s head—every now and then a convincing spark, then a weird impression of his impression: as if he imagines our minds as ‘vague’, ‘soft’, ‘drifting’, ‘spreading’. Up close to the texture of his work, I realise I understand almost nothing about him, and he understands almost nothing about me. We have no shared experience, it seems.