Lately the acting in TV commercials has gotten really good. The other night I saw an ad for some company that helps people get rid of timeshares they don’t want anymore and I thought, Man, that was great, really affecting. That could have been an episode of Togetherness on HBO, if that was still on. Car commercials are particularly satisfying these days. Thirty-second-long one-acts with movie-level production design and cinematography, each one is a humanist masterpiece featuring quality acting that fits right in with streaming drama. In one, a wedding party gets caught in the rain and they can’t walk to the outdoor altar so they have to jump in their mini-SUV to get there. You really get a feel for the relationships between these four people in that thirty seconds. Car manufacturers know our little victories are hard-won. Automakers just get us. In other ads, the family drama of auto insurance plays out just as insightfully.

The spy novel is silly, when it isn’t claustrophobic; urgent, but with an urgency severed from any link to the various impending geopolitical alarms — German invasion, Soviet infiltration, Chinese technological advancement, terrorist havoc — that the genre’s history continually sounds. There is something in the condition of existence in these novels, the presuppositions of their world, in other words, that seems, finally, to be at once illness and cure.