At the same time, the story they chose is sheer fantasy, not in its glancing details but in its emotional momentum.
Those glancing details – the vortex of a snail's shell, the colour and texture of a feather – are not only true to themselves, but they become symbols of larger and more mysterious energy fields.
That desire would be an entire script or series for some writers but, in Happy Valley, it is just a glancing detail that adds to the credibility of its picture of contemporary life.
By the end of the book you realize that every glancing detail has at some point been gathered up and redeployed in this process of grasping the world, a process both marvelously childlike and miraculously equal to the complexities of this richly burdened family.
At first glance, few details of Mary's murder resembled the killing of Janiszewski.
At first glance, the details look unremarkable: sports posters, a radio, magazines and board games.
At first glance, the details of Smith's killing don't quite square with the tales of unarmed black men being targeted by white cops that have been the building blocks of the Black Lives Matter movement.
This is a city of second glances, of details.
A glance at the details of the results provided by some polling organizations indicates that the number of undecideds may be higher than is normally reported.
So a word, a glance or a detail will look different, coming up as McAvoy might imagine it in "Him" than it would as Chastain sees it in "Her".
