The restaurant's name is a Provençal word for farmhouse, and its ethos is to collapse the distance and reduce many of the digressions between land and table, field and dinner plate.
It can be frustrating, then, that there's not much to it, and that Pacquola indulges in frantic padding and digression (the conversation between her snooze function and her alarm; waffling on about sound pollution from the adjacent venue) to stretch it to the finishing line.
But I digress (from my digression).
The decades in between seemed almost a digression: the business, the marriage, the children.
But, inexplicably, Mr Baricco sandwiches Gould and his failure between digressions on sport (mostly boxing) and interminable fantasies about cowboys and Indians by Gould's platonic girl friend, Shatzy Shell, who has clearly seen too many Sergio Leone films.
In a rambling speech, Carson, who justly noted "there are a lot of people who love me; they just won't vote for me", buried his announcement in between digressions about the late community organizer Saul Alinsky and attacks on the Federal Reserve for "suppressing interest rates".
In between, in a Proustian spirit of digression, there are philosophical pensées of varying interest, as well as vivid evocations of adolescent hypersensitivity and confusion.
His writing for From Bacteria to Boys, with Jon Irabagon on alto saxophone, Alexis Marcelo on piano and Peter Bitenc on bass, runs toward shifty postbop, veering between swing and backbeats, constitutionally hardy but prone to digression.
In a fascinating digression on Gatling's medical education, for example, she describes the connection between 19th-century smallpox epidemics and steamship travel.
The digression had an endpoint, which is Mr. Mailer's fascination with the relationship between authors and reviewers.
