"I believe I'll make an experiment with candour here," Ames says in letters which will eventually reveal his own opacity, as Robinson discreetly disrupts the monology.
Now that Grey Global, the last independent agency company of substantive size, may be up for sale, the guessing game continues as a result of his continued opacity.
But even if Mangini does not fit into the Jets' future, his Belichickian opacity fits into the reticent colorless rhetorical style of those who fired him: the Jets' owner, Woody Johnson, and General Manager Mike Tannenbaum.
His psychological opacity chimes with the novel's subject matter - a community led by machismo where people cannot afford to mourn their losses for too long if they are to survive.
What is strongest in the novel is the delicacy with which Galchen evokes the bewildering randomness of Leo's visionary insanity; Leo is at his most moving not when he conveniently pleases the reader with explication but when he turns away from the reader, to wash in his own opacity.
Their initial allegiance to the cause gives way to serious misgivings about Assange's uncompromising view of information dissemination and, most ironically of all, his growing opacity when besieged by allegations of sexual assault and censure from the US government and its allies.
His official biographer, Edmund Morris, was so perplexed by his subject's opacity and contradictions that he abandoned his efforts to write a serious work of history and instead produced "Dutch" (Random House, 1999), a cringe-making hodgepodge of fact and fiction, narrated by an imaginary alter ego.
There has always been something unconvincing about his work's opacity; no one seems at home behind many of the pictures.
I'm impatient to see Leonardo DiCaprio's version; his own deflective opacity was at its most effective in another elusive role, that of Frank Abagnale, Jr., in Steven Spielberg's "Catch Me if You Can".
Still, the Kremlin-like opacity of his decision-making — his own evident paranoia, sharpened by years in exile during Saddam Hussein's rule — have made some of his decisions appear capricious and contradictory.
